Put a wide gravel tire on a narrow rim and you feel it in the first fast corner: the tire squirms, the pressure you’d like to run isn’t the pressure you can trust, and the wheel starts deciding your line for you. The Dutch cycling magazine Fiets Magazine reviewed the Anath 423, a wheelset designed to avoid exactly that, in its February 2025 issue (#02): the 9th Wave Anath 423, at the time still sold as the Anath 423 Gravel+.
The headline above the review sums up the test in one line: « It rides like the Sun. » Here is what the testers picked up on, and what is behind it.
What the testers noticed
Three things stood out in the review. The wheels are built around the wide tires that gravel bikes now take. Mounting those tires on the hookless rims turned out to be easy, and the tires were still fully inflated after a week even though the testers had added no sealant. And the stability and durability of the wheels earned praise, which the testers linked to the asymmetric rim profile.
Why a 33mm internal width changes how a tire behaves
Most gravel rims are still close to road rims in width. On a rim that narrow, a 45mm tire is pinched into a squarer, less supported shape, and the sidewall folds earlier when you corner hard or run low pressure. At 33mm internal width, the Anath 423 gives the tire a rounder profile and supports the sidewall along its full height. That is what lets you drop the pressure for comfort and grip without the tire squirming underneath you.
Width also matters for speed on the flat sections. When a wide tire bulges out past a narrow rim, the air has to cross an abrupt step at the tire-rim transition. A wider rim with a depth of 42mm smooths that transition, so the wheel and tire behave more like one shape in the wind. The tested wheelset combined 42mm depth and 33mm internal width in carbon, with DT Swiss 350 or 240 hubs and a weight between 1,460 and 1,530 grams depending on configuration.
What to know about hookless
The Anath 423 rim is hookless: the sidewall is straight, without the hook that holds the tire bead on a conventional rim. That is what makes mounting and seating easy, and it is why the tires in the test held their air. The trade-off is that you need tires marked as hookless compatible, and you need to stay within the maximum pressure for the rim. Our Size & Pressure Chart shows the pressure to start from for your tire width and rider weight.
Why asymmetric matters for stability and spoke life
On a disc-brake rear wheel, the cassette forces the spokes into a dished layout: the spokes on the drive side end up under noticeably more tension than the spokes on the other side. The higher the tension difference, the sooner the low-tension side goes slack under load, and slack spokes are what fatigue and break. The ART asymmetric rim design moves the spoke bed to bring the two sides closer together. Both sides then carry a more even tension, which is what the testers described as extra stability and a lower chance of spoke breakage.
Two builds on the same rim
The rim from the test is now used in two wheelsets. The Anath 423 SL uses DT Swiss 240 EXP hubs and weighs 1377g in its lightest configuration. The Anath 423 uses DT Swiss 350 hubs. Both take tires from 40mm gravel tires up to roughly 60mm (2.35 inch) mountain bike tires, so the same wheels can go from a race to a week of bikepacking with only a tire change.
Read the Anath 423 review yourself
The full test is in Fiets Magazine #02 of 2025.
View the Anath 423 SL in our webshop.
