I'm still on the hunt for my first road bike. I've been looking at some new models and some older used bikes and have a question. At what point do the new lower tier groups like Tiagra and Sora become equal to the older more expensive stuff like 105 and Ultegra? I can get an older bike with what was a better groupset of a newer bike with what is considered an entry level set.


My budget cap is $1,000, so that does limit me to the lower tier of entry level bikes. I see some older stuff at the price range, but don't have the knowledge to know if the older high end gruopsets are that much better than the newer stuff.

They're all pretty solid, but I'd steer away from the older sora with thumb shifters.

You can kinda tell by looking. The current 4600 (and even 3500) look similar to older 6600 and 5600 stuff. Probably a little cheaper materials (and the gear indicator)...but some trickle down is clearly there.

if you wait a month or so you will be able to find year end deals and your money will go farther

This.

I have them. They work perfectly fine for me and what I do. The down side is having to reach back over the bars when you're in the drops.

You can get pretty nice bike for a grand at Bikes Direct if you're handy with a wrench at all.

I used the thumb-shift soras on my bike up until yesterday (about 3000 miles) at which point I switched them out for Ultegra (6500) and, I have to say, it's a big jump in shift performance. Not only is it now possible to shift both up and down from the drops, I find that some shifts are so smooth as to leave me wondering whether I shifted or not.

Though, on the flip-side, I do miss the visual indicator. Much like staring at my computer keyboard (still) while I type, despite typing upwards of 100 WPM these days, I did still look at the gear indicators on the sora shifters (even though I kind of knew what gear I was in.)

I think the visual indicator is a classic case of bottom-up versus top-down adoption. A lot of component companies tried to introduce index/click shifting in their low-end groups from the 50s, but it wasn't until Shimano threw it onto their top-line groups first in the 80s that it really caught on. Because the gear arrow is associated with low-grade groups like Sora and the thumb-shifters and gripshifts on department-store hybrids, nobody riding the high-dollar models will be interested because "I know what gear I'm in!" To which I say, anyone who's never been plugging away up a hill/spinning out down it, and gone looking for that last gear and found they're already in it, hasn't really suffered on a bike.

It'll really take a Grand Tour-contending pro to ask for it before something changes, like Contador asking for WiFli for the steep slopes in the Vuelta. Of course, now you've got Garmin readouts for your Di2 to tell you, so there'll be no point introducing it for Dura Ace, Record or Red mechanical.

Thanks all! I've learned a few things.