Anycubic Kobra 3 Review: Budget Multicolor with ACE Pro

The Anycubic Kobra 3 is an open-frame, bedslinger FDM printer with a 250×250×260 mm build volume, speeds up to 600 mm/s and a direct-drive extruder. Its headline feature is the ACE Pro unit: it adds 4-color printing (up to 8 with two units) and dries your filament at the same time. The printer bundled with ACE Pro is sold as the Kobra 3 Combo.

The verdict in short

In short: the Kobra 3 prints beautifully in single color almost out of the box, and it does multicolor too — with caveats. Single-color prints come out clean and fast, auto-leveling works, and it undercuts Bambu Lab on price. But color costs you piles of purge waste and a temperamental ACE Pro that clogs and glitches for a lot of owners, often right after a firmware update. This is a printer for people who don't mind a bit of tinkering, not a pure plug-and-play machine.

Specifications

Unboxing, setup and build

The printer arrives mostly assembled. You bolt on the gantry, install the print head and screen, and you're done in about 20–30 minutes. The box includes the printer, the ACE Pro unit, a tool kit, a spare nozzle, a filament sample and cables. The paper manual is terse and the wiring isn't labeled, so beginners will squint at diagrams here and there.

The hotend is a one-piece, tool-free swap you pop out with a lever, and the 0.4 mm High Flow nozzle is built for speed. X and Y motion rides on metal pulleys running along a steel rod — cheaper and quieter than V-slot wheels, but its direct rival the Bambu Lab A1 uses proper linear rails, which shave off a bit of vibration. The frame is open: fine for PLA and PETG, but ABS and ASA mean fighting warping and ideally a DIY enclosure.

Auto-leveling and first run

On first boot the printer runs an axis self-test, vibration compensation and LeviQ bed leveling. The head wipes the nozzle on a brush, then touches the bed and finds its own height — no paper feeler needed. The original Kobra 3 uses LeviQ 2.0; the V2 moves to LeviQ 3.0 with full Z-offset compensation.

It isn't flawless, though. Some owners report a bumpy first layer and the fact that the bed can't be adjusted by hand — there are simply no leveling screws, so a slightly warped plate can only be swapped out. Another original-model quirk: you can't nudge the nozzle height on the printer itself, only in the slicer. If your first layer isn't perfect, see our first-layer fix guide.

Print quality

In single color there's little to complain about. The 3D Benchy comes out with crisp walls and no ghosting, an articulated dragon prints "near perfect," and a PETG vase shows smooth layers and no stringing. Testing puts dimensional error around 0.144 mm with a 27/30 geometry score — excellent for a budget bedslinger.

It handles flexible TPU too, but only straight from an external spool: you can't route flexibles through ACE Pro — they tangle in the gears. The stock TPU profiles are too fast, so you'll dial flow down to roughly 7 mm³/s.

Multicolor: the ACE Pro unit

ACE Pro is an external four-spool box with its own hub: a single tube runs to the print head and a splitter on the printer swaps colors. Chain two units for up to 8 colors. Its edge over the Bambu Lab A1: ACE Pro is also a dryer — it dries filament, even mid-print, which is great for hygroscopic PETG and nylon. If you're new to it, here's why you should dry your filament.

Now the pain point. Color changes work like Bambu's — cut, retract, swap — but they burn through a lot of filament. Tom's Hardware measured a four-color spinner at 57 g of model versus 176 g of purge waste — three times the print. An eight-color dragon left 820 g of waste for a 220 g model before a slicer update, and 357 g after. There's no waste bin, so the offcuts just pile up beside the printer.

The good news: a slicer update roughly halved the waste. The current Anycubic Slicer Next added purge-volume tuning, dumping purge into infill and a wipe tower — tune it and the mess drops noticeably. Still, expect color to cost you plastic on this machine.

Speed and noise

The "600 mm/s" figure is a marketing peak. In reality, quality printing sits around 300 mm/s, with a flow ceiling near 25 mm³/s before quality dips. In Tom's Hardware's speed test the Kobra 3's Benchy didn't even crack the top 10 — "something in the slicer is holding it back from its true speed." Treat 600 mm/s as an ad, not a working mode.

The open frame is loud: about 42 dB idle and 55–60 dB while printing, and the ACE Pro is audible even when idle. This is not a quiet printer — if it sits on your desk, you'll hear it.

Software and ecosystem

The slicer went from "half-baked" to genuinely usable. The first version (Anycubic Slicer, based on PrusaSlicer) couldn't read Bambu color .3mf files and had no purge tuning, which drew fair criticism. The current Anycubic Slicer Next is built on OrcaSlicer, tunes purge and looks almost identical to Bambu Studio. You can also run profiles through OrcaSlicer directly.

The weak link is the cloud and mobile app: owners report stalls on a "Busy" status, camera timeouts, and color prints that won't always start from the phone. LAN, on the other hand, is reliable. The other headache is firmware updates: more than once an update has made ACE push filament out instead of feeding it, or sped prints up so much the printer shook. Update sparingly and watch the feedback first.

Common problems

Most complaints trace back to the ACE Pro unit and firmware. The usual suspects:

• Clogs and jams on color change. Too little retraction lets two filaments enter the head at once — error codes "11511" / "11504". See our nozzle clogging guide for cleanup.
• False "tangled filament" errors. The filament feeds fine but the print stops with a tangle warning — fixed with a tidy spool wind and no kinks in the tube.
• ACE Pro failures. The unit stops seeing slots (screen shows "Holder"), pushes filament out or shuts down — sometimes after a firmware update, sometimes a power issue.
• Nozzle temperature swing (code "10409") — the print stops mid-job and leaves a mark on the model.
• Color bleed on dark-to-light transitions — fixed by raising the purge volume in the slicer.
• ABS/ASA warping on the open frame, especially on parts larger than ~10 cm — you'll want an enclosure.
• Occasional factory defects: a bent hotend after the first month, a warped bed, a broken Z-axis part. Regular printer maintenance lowers the odds.

What the Kobra 3 V2 fixed

The Kobra 3 V2 (2025) is a direct answer to complaints about the original. What changed:

• LeviQ 3.0 with full Z-offset compensation instead of LeviQ 2.0
• Y-axis widened from 40 to 60 mm — fewer height errors (that bumpy first layer)
• New SG15 bearings on the X-axis — smoother head motion
• Nozzle from the Kobra S1 — better sealing, less material leakage
• Built-in 720p camera (on the original it was a separate accessory)
• Slightly larger 255×255×260 mm build volume plus area-only leveling

Pros

• 4-color (up to 8) printing for far less than Bambu Lab systems
• ACE Pro doubles as a filament dryer, even during a print
• Excellent single-color quality nearly out of the box: clean Benchy, no stringing
• High speed and acceleration, Input Shaping and vibration compensation
• Paperless LeviQ auto-leveling, runout sensor, print resume
• Flexible magnetic PEI plate — parts pop off easily
• Quick 20–30 minute setup

Cons

• Heavy filament waste on color changes and no waste bin
• ACE Pro is finicky: clogs, tangles, failures, firmware regressions
• Open frame is loud and needs an enclosure for ABS/ASA
• Cloud and mobile app are unreliable
• On the original, nozzle height isn't adjustable on the printer, and the camera costs extra
• Some units ship with a warped, non-adjustable bed

How it compares

The main rival is the Bambu Lab A1. The hardware is close, but the A1 has a more mature ecosystem and software, and its multicolor is more reliable. The Kobra 3's trump cards are the built-in ACE Pro dryer and the price. If you need an enclosure for ABS and ASA, look at its sibling — the enclosed CoreXY Kobra S1. To choose between all the Kobras, see our Anycubic Kobra lineup breakdown.

Worthwhile upgrades

Two upgrades earn their keep. If the stock plate misbehaves, a flexible cold plate fixes adhesion. And if you plan to print abrasives (carbon- or glass-filled filament), fit a set of hardened steel extruder gears — the stock ones wear down fast.

Which filament to buy

Plain PLA is the best starting point — it's forgiving and needs no enclosure. For eye-catching multicolor models, grab dual- or tri-color silk filament. For more on plastics see our filament guide, and our cost calculator helps you price a print.

The bottom line

The Anycubic Kobra 3 Combo is an affordable way to try multicolor printing without paying for the Bambu Lab ecosystem. In single color it's fast and tidy, and the ACE Pro dryer is a genuinely handy touch. The trade-off is piles of purge waste and a finicky feed unit that loves to surprise you after firmware updates.

Who it's for: anyone who wants color on a budget and doesn't mind fiddling with settings. Who it's not for: anyone who wants a truly hassle-free, load-and-go machine — the Bambu Lab A1 lands smoother there. And if you're buying today, get the revised Kobra 3 V2: it addresses most of the original's gripes.

FAQ

Sources

• Tom's Hardware — Anycubic Kobra 3 Review (waste measurements, speed, quality)
• Creative Bloq — 4 months with the Kobra 3 V2 (long-term, ACE Pro problems)
• Notebookcheck — Anycubic Kobra 3 V2 Combo (noise, flow, purge flaw)
• Anycubic Wiki — Kobra 3 Combo (official specs and error codes)
• GamesRadar+ — Anycubic Kobra 3 Combo review