This is a tough question as typically it garners responses that are mostly guesses without any real evidence one way or another. By evidence I mean, someone actually dyno tested the difference any chip might make in power and torque (or can't point to evidence.) Not, it "felt" faster, or "I heard these were a scam", or going off on tangents like "you'll void your warrant" or "why do you want to do that?"

It's widely known stock ECU programming is conservative. If you have a car programmed to take 87 regular octane it's common knowledge you can increase horsepower if you use higher octane fuel and advance the timing (and alter air/fuel mixture curve) as the higher octane fuel will not create engine knock when advancing the timing and you'll get more power.

Never heard anyone claim the $20 chips on Ebay make any real difference, and that would confirm the saying "you get what you pay for." But what about the $100-$200 chips that plug into the OBD2 port? Are they really any different than the cheap Ebay models? I've also seen chips that plug into a sensor under the hood and others you splice in.

Wondering if anyone has found a brand that is reputable, producing products that actually give you some real gain in HP/Torque (like 7-10% or more) in conjunction with running premium gas on the lastest model Japanese 4-cylinder engines from Mazda, Honda, Nissan, Toyota and the like? Someone that's either done a before and after dyno test or before an after with a performance meter like a Passport GT-2. Seems if you can't at lease see a reproducible difference on a performance meter before and after chip, the increase is then non-significant.

I would personally go with no.

The reasons for this: if a chip plugs into a sensor, or ODB2 port (less sure about this), it is going to work by modifying a signal to the ECU to fool it into injecting more fuel (or giving timing advance).

The ECU is running the engine on false and unknown metrics and this just isn't good. I think you'd be unlucky to seriously damage your car but it just won't be as good and you could spend your money better.

That said, most 'professional' tuners will remap an ECU by altering calibration maps (namely injection duration) so again the ECU has absolutely no clue how much fuel is really being injected into the engine and neither does the tuner really. This is not much better than a tuning chip. In-fact I've only ever seen tuned files from two companies (car pro for a 406 hdi and hdi tuning for a 306/206 hdi) that are quality. I've seen LOTS of tunes from much bigger well known companies that are complete trash.

Best is remap by a trusted tuner or at the very least have the knowledge on how to compare your original with what a tuner has written to your ECU and if its garbage demand a refund.

I generally tune my own cars now, I am not a pro and it takes me many months (lack of free time) but the result is always good and kind of pleasing knowing I am driving around on my own tune/software.

So the most visible seller of the $100-$200 OBD2 has yet to reply to my questions from 3 days ago (not surprised).

After more research it appears the only tests that have been done have been on the cheapo Ebay units (Nitro) and they are just flashing lights, no communication with the ECU. Amazing they can sell these as it's complete fraud.

So I determined, for my car, I need a tuner that is either local or would sell me the hardware to do a remote tune using MazdaEdit. The problem is, appears for my engine, no one I have found yet has done a remap. This is not surprising as this mid-level midsize SUV is not going to probably have a high enough percentage of owners seeking to pay $500 for a tune to justify the development time and cost.

They have done EXACTLY what I want on an earlier model of my car though! Remap to take advantage of higher octane and pretty impressive performance gains for a Stage 1 ECU tune only upgrade! Just goes to show how conservative Mazda is. I guess the prefer to allow owners to fill up on 87 as opposed to require 91 (like my Acura MDX) and be able to advertise more horsepower. AN argueably bad decision in my opinion. But I guess they have years of data to know what is going to be the most trouble free regarding warranty claims in the long run.

https://www.facebook.com/Orangevirustun ... 265121317/

Guessing your looking for petrol tuning.... I'm from the UK so we still have a lot of oil burners ;) and I've only ever tuned diesel! I had a quick look too as I can't understand how you can tune 'on-the-fly' from OBD and came across the same article about nitrobox... which is crap!

Either way, I hope you find someone who can help you with a tune :thumbup: I've normally only tuned petrols mechanically (exhaust, air intake) but as you say you can get a lot more out of them by tuning the map too.