Next Tuesday I have a phone meeting in my bike shop considering a new build. The last time I checked I only saw there bikes with SRAM systems and I was wondering if a sram rival is any worse or better than a 105. my main concern is the durability I gotta say.
Uh oh... SRAM vs. Shimano
This is a debate that plagues bike workshops across the globe. The bottom line is they're both great, and if campagnolo didnt supply groupsets to a niche market of rich idiots, who think it somehow puts them in some elite club. Then those two brands would have a duopoly. All offence intended to campagnolo owners, you've made a grave mistake and you should've thought harder about which bike parts to buy...
105 is more durable, it will wear your cables down less because of how the cables are housed in the shifter. SRAM rival shifting is harder on your fingers, but gives a more crisp shift. 105 is easier to shift but slower and less crisp to shift. No matter how good.you are at tuning. This is due to shimano shifters pulling the cable just enough to shift the derailleur, whereas Sram systems pull the cable twice as much as the derailleur actually moves and then any extra movement is then dissipated by the shifter letting the cable go back the way it came. Which wears down cables just a fraction faster again. Sounds rather complex in writing but its not.
They use different shifting levers as well, I prefer shimano but srams double click works fine. Chain, crankset, chainrings and cassette are almost identical in those two models because rival and 105 sit in the same price bracket, they basically copy each other in terms of material/quality of finish.
Also consider the long vs short cage debate. Long cage means you can effectively run a larger range of gears, all the way from 11-32 or 34, maybe more, who knows, that's a really fucking small rollout. But having a long cage derailleur will mean your chain is longer and the jump between sprockets larger, which all in all means it will perform worse and it will be harder to tune.
I say go 105 if they have it, SRAM is perfectly good if they dont.