rb20det Holiday shopping and repair help

[colbol89]

Hey guys, so at long last I have both the funds and time to tune my car and fix all the little things wrong. After extensive research I settled upon going with Nistune for tuning the car. As I've only got around a month of down time before I need the car back to being running I had hoped to buy the Nistune board this morning but found out as of yesterday Nistune closed for the holidays December 18th - Jan 4th so I'm SOL on getting a board from them in time.

Any suggestions on alternative routes to go as I really am hoping to have the car tuned and in great condition before Jan 9th. I've heard a lot of people recommending the much pricery apexi power fc route but is it overkill? I'm really only trying to get 300whp out of my car max and that is way down the road. For right now seeing anything north of 200whp would be great and getting my AFR to not be complete s*** would also be quite nice. The only thing I want to avoid doing is having to replace an aftermarket ECU down the road because it can't manage 300whp. I'm really new to how all the tuning works and what management abilities is required to jump from 200whp to 300whp so don't crucify me if I ask some stupid questions.

I'm not a big fan of getting a chip burned but Carl H, perhaps you could convince me otherwise. I'm really interested in either a weak stand alone or a piggyback that can work with the stock rb20 ECU. Let me know guys

[spolitte]

Out of curiousity why do you want a tunable computer for the car? Do you have any engine/power modifications that would require you to run a tunable computer?

Well, for piggy back systems, you can always go the super cheap safcII route, but once you start to put more and more mods on the car, and start to push 300+ hp I think you won't be too satisfied with it as it is very limited in what it can do.

As for stand alone systems, (IMO) your two best choices for a cheap yet fully programmable ecu is Nistune or having someone else chip your stock ecu. After that, you start getting into systems like the PFC or even Haltech's and AEM's, which are going to cost a bit more money, but should more than satisfy your needs to get into 300 hp range.

Happy hunting