My S6 work in progress with dyno figs and pics

[Acidburn]

Thats a worthy task to take on

sounds quite a good idea, where abouts in herts are you dyno-ing this? I used to live up just outside stevenage and the only one i've used is what used to be performance turbo system's (pts) in luton which was quite good but I had a ford rs turbo at the time

The only thing that might be a problem is the clutch as i've just had mine die which ain't a nice thing.

I didn't even know some of them companies did chips (i.e. quattronics/norway homefries)

look forward to seeing your results.

[JP]

The Norwegian Homefrie chip is being supplied by URQuattro-Island.

As for the Dyno it's in North Luton a company called Evolve. Recommended by Paul from PTS who lives round the corner from me (PTS closed down a little while back).

[macspring]

Mentioned in the dispatches and got a medal !

OK a little update on the intended proceedings. First of I'm going to be swapping back tothe 7A exhaust cam.
Next I've got two gauranteed chips already en route to myself together with a promise of some others to do a comparison run with

Currently the intended test list is as follows (in no particular order)

UK Homefries
Norway Homefries
Quattronics
MRC
Superchips
MTM

my test procedure is going to be as follows.

I will be soldering in a chip cradle for easy swapping of chips. Then I will proceed to do a 50-60mile roadtest of each chip using what I'd consider average use such as school runs (short journey), motorway cruising, and a bit of fun round the countryside.
I'll give each chip marks out of five on fuel consumption according to the MFA, overtaking at motorway speed and general responsivness around the country lanes.

Next I will get the car set up on the dyno again and do an initial 2 base runs on the standard ECU chip to make sure all is callibrated as closely as possible to before, after which I will do 2 power runs on each of the afforementioned chips. First of to check consistancy in performance and secondly to give each chip a chance for best results. Once the dyno day is chosen (will be a saturday) I will quite happily have anyone in the Luton area to come along to verify that the test was conducted as fairly as possible with no unbiased tweaking. (Obviously I would limit this to 2 people so not to make too much of a circus of it).

Lastly if my clutch is still alive at this point and there is still a run what you brung at the pod before winter sets in I would like to do a third test down the quarter which will get scored on best 60ft, best quarter, and trap speed (will have to work out a fair variable on this one). Again choosing an appropriate launch rpm and changing the chip over for every pass.

I will keep you updated as I start to get the chips through the door.

If you, ( and your clutch / licence ) can do it, fair play! You'll deserve a medal, ( and a whip round for a new clutch ).

Should be made a stickie if you get to the end. I hope you do.

Looking forward to the results, as half the forum is I'd say.

Good luck and kind regards.

[aposegil]

JP don't you ever get bored of playing with cars lol

he done the smae thing with 1.8t and 20v's and vr6t and now he branching out.

personaly be interesting to see the results as well

[JP]

Little bit of an update

So far I've got the following generic chips confirmed/en route

A Norwegian Homefrie chip
A Quattronics chip
A Superchips chip

I've taken MTM of the list as they no longer do a chip for my motor so any file I would get hold of can't be bought so is pointless.

MRC have declined the invitation as 1) they do not do a generic chip for the car and 2) as there is a cam change they are claiming that you cannot run a generic chip as the characteristics change the engine. Obviously they seem to be blissfully unaware that we are not after peak gains but just real life results and that the ECU has been proven to be well capable of self calibrating within certain parameters being on closed loop lambda.

So we are now awaiting a reply from s2central regarding the UK homefries chip. Fingers crossed

[G60Rallye]

What a shame MRC aint joining in with the fun, hopefully the UK Homefries chip will get tested. Seems strange some dont want to prove themselves?

[merlin's S4]

What a shame MRC aint joining in with the fun, hopefully the UK Homefries chip will get tested. Seems strange some dont want to prove themselves?

Maybe a bit of a shame but I would argue that MRC have absolutely nothing to prove as far as these cars are concerned. Plus as has already been stated they don't actually offer a generic chip for the S4. A custom map however, I would expect to provide excellent results when you take into account the other mods on this S6!

[merlin's S4]

I've taken MTM of the list as they no longer do a chip for my motor so any file I would get hold of can't be bought so is pointless.

Did you actually speak to MTM in Germany or just the UK dealer (Mr Unpopular)?

I have heard that if you speak to MTM direct in Germany they are incredibly helpful and I can't believe that they wouldn't sell you a chip upgrade if you asked nicely enough!! It's only a file afterall and they wouldn't have binned that.

As for Superchips you'll be needing to disconnect your wastegate and wind down your wastegate spring for one of those!! You'd be better off trying a boost controller.

[A80Avant]

hahaha This is the second Unpopular MTM dealer in europe then!! Why is that that mtm dealers are so 'unpopular'? and the Germans are fine? The unfortunate for Greece is that mtm germany is forwarding our emails to the greek 'unpopular' mtm dealer so....lots of people are turning away from mtm.(not that it is the cheapest tuner anyway...)

[JP]

I didn't get as far as emailing MTM as I couldn't find a generic chip on their website. However I have located someone that will burn me a file onto a chip for testing. So we shall see how that one goes, although no promises on that front.

As for superchips I'll attempt to keep an open mind if I feel things are not running as I'd like em to I will shut the motor down remove the chip and insert better before starting her up again.

As for MRC like you say they don't have anything to prove, in the same token what I am looking at here is what can be achieved on budget based on the fact the ECU has a certain degree of recallibration within it's parameters. This in turn meaning that potentially there is no real need for a custom map when modifications are kept within certain parameters.

So more along the lines information for the masses. Obviously if a company doesn't do a generic chip then thats the end of the argument. If they do, it would be nice to see an unbiased point of view of how it performs against the others. Hence my little experiment.

Looking at the current rolling road graphs it is quite obvious that the mods so far want to make the turbo spool up quicker than the ECU will let it shown in the form of the small boost spike as the ECU kicks in and holds it back. This on a custom map would quite obviously be overcome so further gains could be had. However this is for a test further down the line once a generic chip has been chosen after which a properly ported head is fitted to see if we can exceed the self learning capability of the ECU.

[JP]

Just a little update as I've had a bit of a result and got my hands on a pair of RS2 cams currently en route from Germany. So instead of reverting back to the 7A exhaust cam I'll install the RS2 cams to do the base run with prior to testing the chips.

This way we will end up with a back to back comparison of the 7A exhaust cam mod to the RS2 cams before any chips are tested which may hide the true results.

[merlin's S4]

Nice work!!

[S2central.net]

This is an interesting one - worried a bit about the infamous drivetrain losses claims on those rollers... Nice to see independent evidence that the 7A EX cam pushes the power delivery up the rev range - on stock timing at least.

ALso nice to see evidence of WGFV adaptation with some driving after the cam change.

I'm kind of interested in this little adventure but the chips I have for AAN are not really optimised for that setup - I mean they work OK, been dyno'd fine but have only had a few tweaks along the way... I've had much more experience on the ABY chip stream.

I think the goal of this chip bake-off is admirable but doing a large number of chips over several months is not going to be fair on everyone... Assuming the dyno's are accurate / repeatable every day you will still get variation for weather and stuff.

I personally think a more objective way to do this is to take the factory chips as reference baseline and get them dyno'd again with focus on pure power at wheels. Then do some G-Tech runs as well as the fuel / overtaking runs. Record all ambient conditions... Then for each chipset you get to try - do a back to back test with the reference ECU on the same day... That is the only way to track this one properly so that crap fuel or whatever skews results.

So I'm sort of interested in this exercise if its done properly, and I need more time to tweak my AAN settings so you can do some B2B tests with others before anything from me turns up.

[JP]

I'm aware of climate variations. Hence the idea was to drive each chip initially for a set amount of miles to allow the maps to settle to the configuration of the engine.
Once this was achieved to drive to the dyno on the standard chip strap her down and do another base run. I'll be intending to do all the power runs as WHP not calculated flywheel to give the most realistic results from here on to aid against the calculated drivetrain losses. As shown in the last test.

Once the initial power run has been done the idea was to unplug the ECU swap the chip plug it back in and do another power run. Repeating this process on the same day same calibration two runs for each chip until they were all done before unstrapping the car.

As for optimised chips for this setup none of the ones I'm testing are they are intended all to be generics for a standard engine no headwork or cams. I'm working on the theory that as the ECU has the ability to re adjust the generic chip should be capable of producing more power than it was intended to on a standard setup with no risk of unreliabilty.

The general driving test is something that is a bit more difficult to do as like you say everything changes on a daily basis. So the idea was to get an overal average based on what I'm used to. Obviously there will be key points that can be noted down for comparison sakes which would be pulled of the MFA. This will hopefully give an idea of fuel consumption which again should be backed up by the wideband AFR readings that are collected from each dyno pull.

Instead of using a G-Tech unit for the speed runs I was intending to use the same testing method as the dyno pulls with chip swaps between runs on the quarter at the pod on the same day obviously keeping in account temperature/climate variations thoughout the day.

I write regularly for the Golf+ magazine in their tech section so for my own credibility I want the results to be as fair as possible as I dont think the overal best chip should just be based on max hp and tq but an overal scoring on multiple factors as previously pointed out in an earlier post.

If my suspicions are correct I dont think there will be a clear cut winner it will come down to an individual saying they prefer the idea of chip 'x' because it suits their cars demeanor and their driving style best. However there will always be those that are narrow minded skip through the info and go for the pub figures which is why I wish to try 3 different tests. Road, Track and Dyno.

If you're happy to participate I will keep the initial test results purely down to the road driving side of things until you feel you are happy with a chip configuration you wish to submit. As there is no point in doing a dyno run on 2 seperate days if I wish to keep the results as impartial as possible.

[S2central.net]

I wasn't suggesting that I wish to customise a chip here --- it's just that my current AAN stuff is a variant of the ABY stream which doesn't behave the same way when running in an AAN ECU. Thats the optimisation I refer to... I have some new tricks on the ABY stream running in my own car that I plan to make generic as soon as I get some more road time and a 2nd opinion - that tweak will translate into AAN as well, but I can't say more for now.

Good generic chips are where my head is at... trouble is I'm spreading myself into 7A and 3B at the moment as there has been some demand there - plus I enjoy the challenge. If you were doing this on ABY I would be all over it...

What timeline are you working towards ?

I personally think you will get great comparative results from the G-Tech - in conjunction with RR and dragstrip runs it should provide great data - as long as you can really do it repeatably on the same day and honestly record when things are different - like getting a bad launch on the dragstrip with chip X - if you have G-Tech Pro logging all the runs then you have hard evidence to look at later on... I know from experience how tricky it can be to remember exactly which run was which sometimes.