Umarex Notos Gen 2 Review: A Regulated PCP for Less Than $300

The Notos Gen 2 is a short, light, regulated, side-lever .22 PCP carbine: a 13.5-inch barrel, a 118cc onboard tank filled to 3,625 PSI through a Foster quick-connect port, a 15-shot auto-indexing rotary magazine, an adjustable-length stock giving 32.75 to 35.5 inches overall, a built-in SilencAir moderator and a generous Picatinny rail. One magazine and one single-shot tray come in the box. Umarex offers a separate pistol-grip set that converts it to a pistol and a fiber-optic open sight set, both sold separately.

Umarex lists four changes from the original Notos: a redesigned cocking lever, a redesigned 15-shot magazine (the Gen 1 held seven), a longer barrel, a redesigned SilencAir device and a larger, higher-pressure onboard tank. Umarex does not publish the Gen 1 figures alongside them, so the size of the barrel and tank changes cannot be read off the page — only that they went up.

The magazine change is the one that matters most day to day. Seven shots is a magazine you are always reloading; fifteen is a magazine that lasts a squirrel hunt. Hard Air Magazine also notes that the Gen 2 magazine fits the original Notos, which is a decent thing for Umarex to have done for existing owners.

An unregulated PCP delivers a velocity curve. Pressure falls shot by shot, the firing valve behaves differently at each pressure, and velocity rises, peaks and then drops away. You learn where your rifle's usable window is and you refill before you leave it. That is how the Umarex Origin works, and it is how most PCPs at this price work.

A regulated PCP puts a pressure valve in the way. Every shot gets the regulator's set pressure, not the tank's current pressure, so velocity holds flat until the tank falls to the set point — at which point it falls off a cliff rather than tapering. The practical difference is that you stop thinking about where you are in the fill.

Two measured findings say the Notos Gen 2's regulator is doing its job:

Umarex prints three performance figures for this rifle, and they cannot all be correct. This is the second Umarex product in a row where we have had to write this paragraph — the same thing happens on the Origin, where three different .22 velocities appear on one page.

Our reading: the 11.9 grain figure is the trustworthy one, because an independent chronograph confirmed it almost exactly. Treat the 15.89 gr velocity and the joule figure as unreliable. If you want a single number to plan against, use HAM's measured energy band rather than any published velocity.

That band is useful and honest: 17.2 to 26.3 ft-lbdepending on pellet, with most of the accurate pellets landing between 18 and 23 ft-lb. Against the 12 ft-lb at-the-target small-game bar we use across the site, that clears comfortably for squirrels, rabbits and raccoon-class pests inside sensible range — see our hunting air rifle guide for how that bar works by quarry. It is not a deer rifle, and nothing about it pretends to be.

This is where the Notos Gen 2 earns its score. Hard Air Magazine chronographed and accuracy-rated nine pellets, and seven of the nine came back Excellent. That is an unusually forgiving rifle — most air rifles at any price are fussy about one or two pellets and mediocre with the rest.

Two things worth pulling out of that table. The best-tested pellet is the heaviest— the 25.39 grain JSB Jumbo Monster, at the lowest velocity on the page. HAM reported that seven of ten shots went through one hole at 25 yards with it, with the other three slightly off, and called it possibly the best 25-yard target the reviewer had shot. A rifle that shoots its best with a heavy pellet at 640 fps is telling you it is a precision instrument rather than a velocity contest.

And slugs are a dead end here.The NSA hollowpoints rated Very Poor, and the reviewer's conclusion was that this is probably not a slug gun. That is worth knowing before you spend money on slugs for it. Start with heavy domed lead — our pellet guide covers the weights and nose shapes worth trying.

The Notos Gen 2's weak points are all ergonomic, and there are more of them than the marketing suggests.

The triggermeasured 4 pounds 5.5 ounces as received, varying by about three ounces, and is described as rather gritty and needing conscious effort to pull through. It is adjustable, and it is explicitly not match grade. For context, the Origin's trigger measured about 2.8 pounds out of the box in Outdoor Life's test — so the cheaper, regulated rifle has the worse trigger by a wide margin.

The cocking lever is the bigger complaint. It is heavy, because the design gives it limited mechanical advantage; it is mounted on the left side and cannot be moved; it sits very close to the protruding magazine; and it has to be pushed fully home so the catch engages, or it can swing out when the rifle fires. That last one is a handling detail you want to internalize on day one rather than discover in the field.

The rest of the list, in descending order of how much it would bother us:

On the positive side of handling: 6 pounds 7 ounces all-upwith scope, rings, riser and a loaded magazine is genuinely light for a scoped PCP, and the adjustable-length stock means it fits a smaller shooter and an adult. Umarex publishes pressure-gauge accuracy as plus or minus 10 percent, and HAM reported the test gun's gauge reading with commendable accuracy — a side-mounted gauge you can actually trust is a small thing that matters on a rifle you fill often.

These are the two Umarex PCPs a first-time buyer is choosing between, and they are opposites. The honest framing is that one solves the air problem and the other solves the consistency problem, and you cannot have both for this money.

Buy the Notos Gen 2 if you already have air. If a pump, tank or compressor is already in the garage, the Notos gives you regulated consistency, a better fill fitting and a carbine that is eleven inches shorter, for less money. Our PCP fill guide covers what that equipment costs if you do not have it yet.

Buy the Origin if you do not.The pump in the box is worth more than the regulator to someone whose alternative is not shooting, and the Origin's longer barrel and 40-shot fill suit a bench or a blind better than a 13.5-inch carbine does.

The Notos Gen 2 ships with no optic and a Picatinny rail, described by Umarex as generous in length. That is the easier of the two airgun rail standards to buy for: Picatinny rings lock lugs into transverse slots rather than clamping onto a dovetail slope, so there is nothing to creep and no stop pin to worry about. Being a recoilless PCP, it also does not need glass rated for spring-piston recoil.

Two fitment notes. HAM's test rifle wore a riserin addition to rings, which is a hint that the built-in moderator and the magazine standing proud of the receiver both want some height above the rail. And if you are mounting a scope you already own on an 11mm dovetail mount, it will not fit this rifle without an adapter — the rail is Picatinny only, unlike the Origin's combination rail.

Our air rifle scope mount roundup tables the published center heights and objective clearances, and the scope roundup covers the close-focus parallax requirement that is specific to airgun optics. Then our sight-in guide walks the zeroing sequence.

Buy the Notos Gen 2 if you want regulated consistency on an entry budget, you already own a fill source, and your shooting is small game or paper inside about 40 yards. It is also a strong choice for a smaller shooter: 6 pounds 7 ounces scoped and an adjustable stock down to 32.75 inches is a rifle a young shooter can actually hold up.

Buy something else if one of these is you:

The Notos Gen 2 is a genuinely interesting rifle because it moves a feature down a price class rather than adding a feature to a price class. A measured 1.88 fps standard deviation across nine pellets, a regulator set point reached at shot 28 that matches the published claim, seven of nine pellets rated Excellent, and a 25-yard target the tester called one of the best he had shot — all under three hundred dollars, in a six-and-a-half-pound scoped carbine.

What keeps it off a higher score is everything you touch. The trigger is gritty and heavy, the cocking lever is heavy and demands to be pushed fully home, the safety is hard to read, the stock rattles and the fill-port cover is a nuisance in the cold. And Umarex is again publishing figures that contradict each other on its own product page — the joule number and the velocity number beside it cannot both be right, and on this rifle the arithmetic is easy enough to check that there is no excuse for it.

We do not sell air rifles, so we have no reason to talk you up the range or to skip past the ergonomic list. If you already have air and you want flat velocity for entry money, this is the rifle. If you do not have air, buy the Origin and its pump first.