Best .308 Ammo for Hunting – 100 Yard Ammo Test

Finding the perfect ammo combination for your new rifle can be tricky.  There are several options on the market and some perform better out of your rifle versus my rifle.  I’ve been shooting the CVA Cascade .308 for several months now, and I wanted to know which factory load would shoot best out of it.  Ammo inventories fluctuate regularly depending on supply and demand, but thankfully I’ve been able to find the following five brands/styles of .308 rounds.

We took five different loads out to the range to see what kind of groups we could get at 100 yards. You can watch the entire video below.

Before you watch, though, I want you to know that I am by no means an expert marksman. Prior to the past year or so, I was what I call your average hunting shooter. What I mean by that is that we would get our rifles out a few weeks before deer season came in and shoot them a few times to make sure we were still fairly happy with the groups. Then we wouldn’t shoot again until we were shooting at a deer or when the same time the next year rolled around.

I’m still learning and trying to get better, so just remember that when you watch.

This ammo test was tested with the CVA Cascade .308 that’s equipped with a Hawke Endurance 30 WA SF 4-16×50.  Each shot was taken from the bench setting in Caldwell The Rock Dlx Shooting Rest and Rear Bag Combo.  Each round tested is considered a soft point, no hollow point rounds were considered for the test (this time).

100 Yard Ammo Test | Options

We took several popular rounds, including Federal Power-Shok 150 grain bullets, Winchester Super-X 150 grain, Norma Whitetail 150 grain, Federal Buckmasters 150 grain, and Federal Fusion 165 grain out to the range and shot 3 rounds at 100 yards.  Each of these rounds have a similar price tag, however, the Federal Buckmasters are the most expensive in the test.

Most hunting scenarios do not present long range shot opportunities in my area, so 100 yards is perfect for today’s test.  I didn’t include the muzzle energy or muzzle velocity in the criteria above because I’m only interested in how this ammo performs while deer hunting.

Watch the video to see for yourself how each one fared. I will tell you that there were a couple of rounds that the CVA Cascade seemed to like better than the others. But the nice thing is that pretty much every shot we took would have been a kill shot, assuming I was aiming at the right spot.

100 Yard Ammo Test Improvements

As I mentioned, as I continue to practice more, the groups should get even better. So there’s that. But, really, all the rounds we shot did relatively well. I would like to have been able to test the bullets in some ballistic gel to see how they react when they hit a target to take the test one step further, but we stuck with groups for now.

This is the same test and similar to a hunting scenario that I would expect in most scenarios.  For increased accuracy, some hunters prefer to reload their own ammo, but factory loads proved sufficient and met my needs on the range.  With a little more target practice, maybe I can put these factory loads to the test at longer ranges.  For now, I’ll stick with close range shots to match my hunting style.

We could get into the nitty-gritty of each load, such as the lighter bullets vs. heavier bullets, twist rate, or ballistic coefficient, but most deer hunters aren’t interested in hearing about that stuff.  We just need to know which ammo is worth my money and will it efficiently and effectively kill a deer.