New Federal Gold Medal Match 224 Valkyrie Ammunition

I got a couple of boxes of the updated Federal Gold Medal Match 90 SMK ammo to the range today. I have NEVER been able to shoot well with the original offering of this ammunition from Federal, typically shooting 2″ to 3″ groups or worse, with the barrel seemingly spraying bullets everywhere. I ran my Bison Armory 24″ barrel with a Yankee Hill Resonator 30 cal silencer. I’m shooting at the 100 yard range at Clark Rifles near Vancouver Washington.

Old package on the left, new package on the right. I got the new ammo, in updated packaging, topped with the 90 SMK with the new thicker jackets and crossed my fingers. The results were excellent:

First two groups out of my rifle were five shots each of the FGMM loads, labelled as such on the target. Both came up 0.78 MOA. The ammo was running about 2650 and was surprisingly consistent in terms of velocity. I shot some of the old stuff, from a later batch therein, which ran a little over 2700 fps. Federal has backed off on the load a little as their earlier loads were way too hot. The old batch I ran I think was from a second run as it wasn’t as hot as the original stuff, and didn’t spray all over the place, but still only managed about 1.26 MOA, which is quite a bit better than what I’m used to.

I also got in a box of the new 90 SMK bullets from Sierra with the thicker jackets and loaded them up. I used an RCBS neck-bushing die to resize the once-fired Starline brass. I’m going to stick with the neck bushing die for loading this ammo from now on. First group out is at the bottom right, 5 shots into 0.48 MOA. These loads were light at 2590 fps or so, which stays above 1200 fps past 1100 yards. The light loads used 26.5 grains of Win 760 loaded to 2.290″ OAL. The next two loads shot nicely sub-MOA at 27.0 and 27.5 grains for 2650 and 2700 fps respectively. At 2700 fps these bullets are staying above 1200 fps to 1200 yards. I think this load, and the factory load, can shoot at 1000 yards out of a 20″ barrel with some legs to spare.

The two un-annotated groups are from my 22″ upper. The really poor group is one of my hand loads, and that barrel always shoots my SMK hand loads poorly. The smaller group that isn’t marked is the 90 SMK FGMM stuff, which shoots a lot better from this barrel than my hand loads. Go figure. That barrel has not impressed me and only really likes the 85 RDF for some reason. Still, keeping below 1.25 MOA consistently is good for that barrel.

I’m extremely pleased to see that Federal and Sierra have figured things out.