The SIG-Sauer Tread 716i: 21st Century Battle Rifle

Hey guys, Hop here. I'm in the tree-infested wasteland of Oregon with a SIG Sauer 716i TREAD. This is SIG's take on the AR-10 or LR-308 platform. It is also the main battle rifle of the Indian military, which might be what the I stands for. But it might not. It might stand for impingement, which we'll talk about in just a little bit. Before we look at the details and configuration of this rifle, we're going to talk a little bit about the background and history of the 716 platform. And I'll give you guys my best explanation as for why it's taken me so long to get around to this review. Let's go for it. You good? Maybe. Yes. Easy. Yep. Before SIG introduced the M5 Spear into 77 Fury, this was their modern battle rifle. The 716i is their take on the DPMS LR-308 platform, more or less. This is still a fairly proprietary rifle, as almost all big bore ARs are. This is a little closer to a DPMS LR-308 than an AR-10, but it doesn't really matter too much. We can just agree to refer to all of these as AR-10s, if you'd like. I don't know. I'm just floating that out there. Anyway, this is not the first rifle in the 716 series. This is, I think, the third one. The original 716 was sort of an older generation of SIG rifle, and that one is actually a scaled up version of the 516. The 516 is a piston-driven AR that was basically designed as a successor or an improvement on the HK416. The original SIG 716 was a short-stroke piston-driven AR-10. Remember, we're using the term AR-10 very loosely here. It did have a lot of features that should have made it appealing to military buyers, like cold hammer-forged chrome-lined barrels. They also had adjustable gas regulators and very thick, rigid quad rails. The 716 G2 was a minor update, just a generational improvement really, but it was still the same basic rifle. Ironic then that the 716i is the one that actually got some military adoption. The version of this rifle that is commercially available on the U.S. civilian market is virtually identical to the one that SIG makes for the Indian military. There is a minor change to the handguard contour, and that's the only substantial difference. This is really the only configuration of this rifle available, although you can get it in brown with a different muzzle device, but that hardly counts. That's more of a skew than anything else. That's why it's taken me so long to get around to reviewing this rifle. I'll be honest with you, it's because I really like it. My initial impressions of the 716i were so good that I thought I better put a lot of And at this point, I think I've got enough trigger time and shots through this rifle to do a pretty good review, and I think my initial impressions were correct. This is really an excellent rifle. I like it quite a lot, although the configuration is a little strange, so you may not really find this to be a very useful gun to buy. The real question is, if you've already made the decision to step up to the .308 cartridge, does this rifle make the most sense for you? Would you be better off building or buying something better suited to long-range precision shooting? Because as the SIG 716i comes out of the box, it is a battle rifle, which makes sense. This is one of the world's modern battle rifles, as currently employed by the Indian military. Battle rifles seem to be making a bit of a comeback if the adoption of the M5 spear is anything to go by. I remain unconvinced the battle rifle concept is necessarily something that you or I should be investing in, much less militaries of the world, but that's a discussion for smarter people on another day. Anyway, let's take a closer look at the way this rifle is put together, and we'll go over the way I have it configured probably at the end of the video. All right, the 716i has been dragged up and down the mountains of Oregon and Utah a couple of times. Now it's ready for its close-up. A little bit salty, but still handsome nonetheless. The 716i is relatively lightweight as far as AR-10s go, but really that's only if you compare it to the sort of classic large-frame ARs. If you look at newer small-frame AR designs, like the DPMS Gen 2 pattern, which includes the Ruger SFAR and the POF Revolution, and I think some of the Rogues, I can't remember, they have a lot of different guns. Those are all significantly lighter, they use a smaller receiver, and a lot of reduced size components. But if you just compare to other large-frame ARs, like the Springfield Armory St. Victor 308, or the Arrow M5, stuff like that, then the SIG TREAD 716 is a little bit on the lighter side. Most of that, though, is cheater weight, which we'll talk about when we get to the relevant components. Starting with the receiver set, the 716i lower is very similar to the one that they've been using on the M400 and the M400 TREAD series rifles. It has partially ambidextrous controls, but it doesn't have the right-side mirrored controls or the right-side bolt hold-open system like on the MCX Spear series. This has an ambidextrous safety selector with the shortened lever on the off-hand side, which is nice so it doesn't get in the way of your trigger finger when you flick the safety off. It also has a higher-profile contour than a lot of safety levers, which makes it really easy to use. I like that quite a lot. This has an ambidextrous magazine release. The button on the right side is extended, or a little bit lengthened, compared to sort of a mil-spec-style AR magazine release. The one on the left is very well-warded, so it's not going to be accidentally bumped, so you don't have to worry about dropping your mag when this thing, you know, bangs against your web gear or your belt line or anything like that. The bolt catch also has the larger extended paddle thing on the bottom, which makes it a little bit easier if you're trying to lock the bolt open manually. This lower also has ambidextrous sling QD cups on the back of the receiver near the end plate. I don't really like the positioning of those personally. I find that when I have a sling attached there, it just interferes with my charging handle access. I think it makes sense on a folding stock gun like the MCX series or the Spear, but not so much on a standard AR platform with a buffer tube, and I think SIG is actually moving away from it. I don't see those on their current versions of the M400 lower. As far as triggers go, the 716i has one of those polished mil-spec-style triggers, so it's not very light and it's not very crisp. It's not a bad trigger by any means, but it's very much a battle rifle trigger, not a precision rifle trigger. You can use a standard AR-15 trigger in this lower, so I swapped it out for a Schmid 2-stage. I did, however, use the original trigger pins that came with the rifle, not the ones that came with the Schmid trigger. I made that swap about halfway through the shooting that I've done with this rifle, and it did not make any difference in reliability at all, even with steel case ammunition. The upper and lower receiver are both forged rather than billet based on the forge markings. I think these came from Anker Harvey, and I assume all the machining was done by SIG because that's generally how receiver sets work. Moving on to the upper, the 716i comes with a standard mil-spec-style charging handle. It's not compatible with AR-10, DPMS, LR308, or AR-15 charging handles, but there is a pretty nice ambidextrous one available from SIG. It's a bit hard to find in stock, but it's a very worthwhile upgrade, although I think the rifle really should just come with that out of the box because it's not like you can go buy anybody else's charging handle. Why waste time with the mil-spec one? Another interesting feature on the upper of this rifle is that there's a steel insert pinned in place on the brass deflector. I wonder if that's because the use of steel ammunition in the Indian military beats up the brass deflector over time, and they figured, hey, might as well make it a hardened part or just a replaceable part. Also, as far as internals go, the bulk carrier group on the 716i is pretty nice. It's got the little sand-defeating cuts at the rear, and it also has dual ejectors, which is just one of those little reliability tweaks that I guess some people like. Again, I think this thing is 99% proprietary, but there's no issues with the factory part, so you can just leave it there. As far as furniture goes, the gun comes with SIG's in-house pistol grip, which is not bad. Pretty comfortable, has a nice angle to it, but I do find it to be a little bit on the slim side, so I replaced it with a regular Magpul MOE grip. The stock is where we get into the first instance of cheater weight on the rifle. The factory stock is the Magpul SLK, which I really don't like on almost any gun. I replaced the SLK stock almost immediately with the regular Magpul CTR stock that does have the thicker recoil pad installed. Now I have a nice sling swivel, and also the thicker recoil pad is pretty nice if you're shooting from the prone, and less of the stock is coming into contact with your shoulder. Kinda nice to have a little bit of extra cushion when the stock ends up just contacting your collarbone and nothing else. Moving on to the barrel and forend, we get a little bit more of that cheater weight, because this is a 16-inch barreled gun, not an 18 or 20, which is what you may expect from a precision-oriented AR-10. The barrel is a nice profile, though. It's not a pencil-weight barrel, so they're not shaving weight at the front to make the gun feel like it handles better. A 16-inch medium-contour barrel does seem to suit the battle rifle philosophy more so than a precision rifle. One of the interesting things about the 716i is that it has a rifle-length gas system on a 16-inch barrel, making it kinda close to an AR-10 dissipator, I guess. The gas block is pinned in place, and it is not adjustable. Combine the rifle-length gas system with the standard H2 buffer weight that comes in the rifle, and this thing is actually surprisingly soft-shooting for a .308 AR. This rifle is extremely well-tuned out of the box. It's soft-shooting, but it has cycled every type of ammunition that I've shot through it, suppressed and unsuppressed. But because it does have a non-adjustable gas block that you cannot really replace, it's probably not the best candidate for suppression overall. Even though SIG cheated the weight a little bit, they did not cheat the recoil by throwing a huge fuck-off muzzle brake on there. The standard muzzle device is a three-prong flash hider that works very well. One issue you might have with trying to run a suppressor, and this ties back into the sort of general proprietary nature of this rifle, is that the barrel has a tapered shoulder behind the muzzle threads. SIG does that on all their rifles now, I believe, and I'm sure it's a great thing from a technical standpoint, but from an open-platform standpoint, it's probably gonna be a little bit frustrating. I've tried suppressing this rifle two different ways using the YHM Resonator K. One method was to use a Hansen Brothers direct-thread adapter with a tapered shoulder. The other way was to use SIG's little taper adapter, which is just an $8 piece of metal that slides over the little shoulder on the barrel and gives you a flush face to mount your regular muzzle devices with. I used that configuration very briefly with a regular YHM Phantom QD muzzle brake. That meant that I had the muzzle brake, then a shim, then the collar, and then the taper on the barrel, which is a little weird and it was kind of frustrating trying to get everything timed up and tight. So I would definitely prefer just to use the direct-thread suppressor adapter. The last thing to talk about is the handguard. This rifle does have a really nice free-float M-LOK handguard. It's very rigid. It doesn't compromise strength for light weight or anything like that. It also has an indexing tab that interfaces with the upper receiver, so the thing locks into position extremely solid. I would not be worried about this thing rotating at all. It would be a very good candidate for lasers and lights and night vision stuff, tape switches, all that sort of thing. There is another model of the 716i available called the Snakebite. The main difference with that one is that it's got a brown paint job. The other difference is that it has a muzzle brake, and because the muzzle brake isn't actually a taper mount like the original Flash Hider, that means the gun has to include one of the little adapter collars already pre-installed. So kind of a nice bonus. Again, it's a little frustrating trying to order parts from SIG, and sometimes it's hard to find that collar in stock. Plus, it's never fun to buy an $8 part with $15 shipping that really should have just come with the gun. So my overall thoughts as far as the out-of-the-box configuration of the 716i goes, I would like this thing to come with a better stock, probably just the full-size SL. That would drive the weight up a little bit, but it's just a better stock all around. I also think the gun should have the ambidextrous SIG charging handle already installed, no point messing around with the mil-spec one, and I think they should just go ahead and toss that little shoulder adapter in the box with the gun. If you really like tinkering with your guns, you might be kind of frustrated by the proprietary nature of the 716i, but there are no major functional issues that need to be addressed with aftermarket parts, so it doesn't bother me at all. The fact that you can only get one upgraded proprietary charging handle for the gun doesn't bother me because it's as good as any charging handle I would put in there anyway. The pinned non-adjustable gas block doesn't bother me because I really hate adjustable gas blocks. My opinion is that over time, an adjustable gas block will either turn into a non-adjustable gas block or a broken gas block, so I'd rather go ahead and skip that process and just get a regular-ass gas block to start with. The gun is already so well-tuned out of the box that I don't think you have to do a whole lot to it. Maybe you can upgrade the buffer weight if you plan on running it a lot suppressed. Otherwise, I think you're pretty much good to go. And that was a hit. Might have just been the corner. I saw it move. TEAMWORK! I've been shooting the 716i in multiple configurations for a while now, and it's currently sitting at about 1,500 rounds. That may not sound like a whole lot, but it's a lot for me, and it's a lot for .308. As much as I would like to do a T-Rex-arm-style burndown of this gun with 5,000 rounds, 5,000 rounds of .308 is pretty close to $5,000 worth of ammunition. The 716 has been 100% reliable suppressed and unsuppressed with every type of ammunition that I've put through it, with the exception of one extremely bad load of ammo ink .308. This stuff is so far out of spec that about 40% of the rounds won't chamber in any of the .308 or 7.62x51 rifles that I've shot it through. And unfortunately, I bought 600 rounds of it. Oh well. At least it was cheap, right? The 716's unorthodox gas system and heavier-than-average standard buffer weight makes it a very smooth shooting rifle. Adding the YHM Resonator K obviously increases back pressure and makes the gun shoot a little bit worse, but it's still reliable and it's not explosively overgassed. I didn't really care to shoot the rifle suppressed all that much. A short can like the Resonator K doesn't really make it that quiet. Getting a cloud of gas in your eyes and having to deal with heat mirage from the suppressor is also not great when you're using a magnified optic and trying to shoot at longer range. Moving on to accuracy. I was able to get some pretty good groups out of the 716, but I'm not really number one bench-rest shooter guy. I don't have access to a 100-yard flat range, so I kinda gotta ad hoc that shit in the woods. The best I've been able to do is about 1.5 to 2.5 MOA using either Federal Gold Metal Match or IMI Razor Core, which is very similar to the M118LR load used by the U.S. military. A lot of the shooting I did with the 716 was with low-power variable optics with fixed parallax and some of the shooting was with a Vortex 2-10 Viper PST Gen 2 with adjustable side parallax. I think I could shrink those groups down by using a higher magnification scope and shooting from a bench, and a better bench-rest shooter could probably do even more than that. I'm not gonna say the 716 is a half-minute gun, it's probably more of like a 1-2.5 MOA gun depending on the ammo you use and what your preferred group size is. You can get almost anything sub-MOA if you just shoot 3-round groups. My patience is too low and my blood caffeine content is too high to really get into the weeds of that stuff. So given that the 716 is not the most high-precision rifle in the world and .308 is not the most precise cartridge to begin with, and the fact that it's fairly lightweight for a .308, what kind of roles or configurations make sense for the 716? Some of that depends on what you think the role of a .308 rifle is. Could the 716 be a modern-day battle rifle? Yeah, I figure there are two ways you can go with that. One is to try to set up a relatively light, handy, portable .308 in the same way that you would set up a regular 5.56 rifle. So weapon light, ideally some equipment for night vision use, a close-to-intermediate range optic like an ACOG, a red dot with optional magnifier, or an LPVO. The Sig 716 would be a very good candidate for that, but keep in mind the resulting rifle is gonna weigh a ton. The guy carrying that rifle is going to have a greatly diminished ammunition load as well. If you want something lightweight and hikeable in a major caliber like .308, then one of the newer generation small-frame AR-10s is gonna be a better fit. Depending on configuration, a Ruger SFAR or a POF Revolution would be maybe about two pounds or more lighter than the 716. A .308 rifle could also be a Sapper, to use the nut-and-fancy term, semi-automatic precision rifle, or a C-SAS, which is kind of the military thing right now. That would mean a bipod, probably a suppressor, a higher magnification scope, and you probably wouldn't have to put weapon lights or lasers on it. If I remember correctly, Sig actually made a C-SAS variant of the MCX to pitch to the US military, but they did not win that program. However, some of those features ended up on the M5 Spear in the end. The 716 is probably not the right rifle to use for that. It's on the lightweight side for a semi-auto .308, but that's not really a good thing when you're talking about a C-SAS. The C-SAS or Sapper is a gun that you take out of the truck and set up in a fixed position only when you need it. So a longer-barreled, heavier rifle is definitely the play. Also, if you intend to stretch out to extreme ranges, then there are much better calibers than .308. The older 716 and 716G2 were available in different configurations, some of which would have matched these POUs a lot better. The 716G2 DMR was a longer-barreled 6.5 Creedmoor, for example. They also made a short-barreled version, which would have been a pretty good candidate for a modern-day battle rifle. Anyway, the configuration that makes the most sense to me with the 716 is to take some inspiration from the military's SDMR, Squad Designated Marksman Rifle. I believe that rifle currently takes the form of an HK417 with a bipod, maybe a suppressor, and a SIG Tango 1-6 LPVO. I'm not going to go so far as to say that the military's choice of rifle or optic was very good here, but I like the idea. I think that an LPVO is the right optic to put on the SIG 716. And that's the configuration I've done most of my shooting with, and the one that I've been most happy with. Initially, I had the gun set up with probably too much stuff on it. I was using the Viper PST Gen 2 2-10, which is a really excellent scope, particularly for the money, but it's also very heavy for not a whole lot of top-end magnification. I also had the gun suppressed, with a bipod and a weapon light on it. Dialing it back a little bit to our ERSAT's SDMR configuration made a lot more sense. At first, the LPVO that I used was the EOTech Voodoo 1-6, specifically the one with, I think, the SR-2 reticle, which is a 7.62 BDC calibrated for M118LR. The drops on the SR-2 reticle are set up for a higher muzzle velocity than I can get out of the 16-inch barreled 716, but it's pretty easy to use the Strelok Pro app to refine your zero, and then the drops all line up. At least it was until Strelok got sanctioned. Now I don't think you can even get it anymore. Very cool, U.S. State Department. I really like the battlefield simplicity of a good BDC reticle. However, the Voodoo 1-6 was ultimately not the right scope for me. We can talk about this some other time, but the reticle's performance on 1X is not very good, and the fact that the turrets are completely unlocked is just unacceptable to me. In one of the run-and-gun drills we were shooting in Utah, I kept hitting really far to the right, and I wasn't sure why until I finished the drill, looked at my windage turret, and realized it was about 6 clicks off. I replaced the Voodoo 1-6 with the new Voodoo 1-10, which is overall a much better scope. Mostly just in configuration. The Voodoo 1-10 has a locking elevation turret and a capped windage turret, which is my preferred setup. The reticle in mine is the SR-4, which is just a simple T-shape with MOA hashes. This way I can use the ballistic data from any .308 load of my choosing, and I can either dial for my holds or just hold over on the elevation marks. The extra 4X magnification on the top end is also pretty useful. The purpose of the SDMR isn't to shoot out to extended ranges, it's just to make it a lot easier to shoot out to intermediate ranges. Compared to a 5.56 rifle in a similar configuration, .308's gonna be easier to make hits with out to, say, 400 or so yards, and it's also going to hit harder when the bullet gets there. That's, I think, kind of the whole point of the SDMR concept, and DMRs in general. I mean, the Army used to put an ACOG on an M16 and call that a DMR, so what does that tell ya? I've used the 716 sometimes with a bipod and sometimes without. I was mostly using a Magpul MLOK bipod, which is not the fastest thing to take off or put on. What I would probably prefer to do is use the newer Magpul MOE bipod because it's lighter and you can quickly detach it with a thumbscrew. All you need to have semi-permanently attached to the rifle is the little MLOK bipod adapter. That way you can leave the bipod in your backpack while you're walking around and it's not going to add extra weight to the muzzle and it won't be a snag hazard, but if you ever find yourself in a position where you really want to set up on a bipod, you can whip it out. You may have also noticed that I usually have a vertical grip in addition to the bipod, and that the vertical grip is very far back towards the receiver. I've seen that on pictures of the military SDMRs and I'm not sure why they do it, but the reason that I do it is that I find it a lot easier to stabilize a rifle for standing shots using a vertical grip way far back towards the receiver. 90% of the time I would not shoot with the vertical grip. Currently, I do have a weapon light on the 716. It's just an Arisaka 300 with an E1-HT, the hyper throw head, mounted in such a position that I can easily activate the Arisaka momentary tail cap with my support hand thumb. This thing is not set up for use with night vision, doesn't have a laser or an illuminator or a passive aiming capable optic. It also doesn't have a suppressor because it wouldn't really make the gun that quiet anyway, and the 3-prong flash hider does a perfectly adequate job of signature reduction. The Voodoo 1-10 is a medium weight LPVO. The EOTech PRS cantilever mount is a medium weight mount. With all these concessions towards weight, the 716 in this configuration is actually pretty hikeable. I walked it up and down the hills in Utah on a shoot with brass vacs and it didn't cause me any problems. But again, remember the reduced total ammunition load. I had a 25 round P-Mag in the rifle and 4 20 round mags on a chest rig. That's not a ton of ammunition. Alright, I can already feel that this video is extremely long, so let's try to wrap this thing up. I really like this rifle. I think the SIG Dread 716i is an excellent rifle and it's also very reasonably priced. MSRP is over $1500, but I think people are usually buying these things for about $1250-1300. I really don't think you can get a better rifle for that much money. But that doesn't necessarily make this the right rifle for you. Depending on your conception of what .308 should be used for, this could either be the perfect rifle or the worst rifle ever made. If you're interested in a deeper discussion about the place of battle rifles in current year, I'd say stay tuned to Brass Vax. I think he's going to be talking a little bit about battle rifles in the near future. I'll have some more videos about modern AR-10 style rifles in the future as well. And also probably another video pretty soon talking about chest rig and plate carrier setups for .308. Thank you guys so much for watching and sticking with the video for this long. If you like this kind of content and this channel, please subscribe and I'll keep doing stuff like this. There's also a link in the video description to my Subscribestar page if you'd like to contribute directly. That will help me buy more gear to review. And you'll get access to the archived live show that I do with Brass Vax as well as access to early videos and access to a useless Discord channel where people post cats and stuff. Anyway, I will see you guys next time. Brock, what day is today? It's Wednesday, my dude. Wednesday the 8th? Yeah. Of March. Is that the Ides of March or whatever? It's 3-0-8. But you're not from here, so you would say 8-3. Yeah. See, in America, today is a good day. In Europe, it's just another fucking day.