ORIGINAL: ReaperGN
The Sidewinders are cheap unless you only buy stuff from Hobbyjunk and its affiliates. You could go with the Sabertooth from dimension engineering. But after shipping and such its not all that cheap either The Losi LOSB9522 from the Night Crawler is 50 dollars for one. So your right back at paying the extra 10 dollars for the Sidewinder so you have the programing, power, and capability. If you buy from ebay you can get two sidewinders for under 100 shipped.
my hobbywing ESC's have been preformed way better than the Castle I have...
so yea "hobbyjunk" is the way I'd go... don't know if you ever owned one, or if you did bought the wrong one for the task, but don't go calling the stuff junk as it kinda looks ignorant, and elitist...
Castle esc's in my opinion are the most over priced, over hyped things on the market, and yes I own one, I also regret buying it, but I bought all the hype that people were saying at the time on how they were the best thing ever, and paid way more money for something I ended up replacing with a hobbywing 150A setup which was more capable in the application I needed it for...
As I don't need programming, power or brushless capability they are a waste for a RC tank.
Side note I also hate castles way of obscuring their specs as Powerful enough. I don't care if they feel it is powerful enough I want the actual current draw without having to sacrifice a goat to a pagen god while praying, and using google to try and locate a place that lists the real specs(which if you saw their true specs they are very unimpressive).
As for the LOSB9522 I saw multiple places that they are under $40 shipped a pop. hmm will have to wait to try one till I get some spare cash as I've blown my budget for now on RC parts.