Quote:
Originally Posted by lakercarrera
Hey just wondering what you guys think is the best aftermarket exhaust kit for the money, performance, and sound between tubi fabspeed borla awe, etc
thanks
|
Depends if you're looking for just an improvemenr in sound or both sound and performance. I'm not sure if your car is an 'S' or a 3.6. The results are quite different depending on which car you have. For an 'S', you need to replace your stock catalysers with 100 or 200-cell sports items to find performance - just replacing the headers and mufflers will only give marginal gains (circa 10-12 BHP) whilst a full system inc. cats will give a good 25-30 BHP. For the non-'S', you will still get the 10-12 BHP gains from headers/mufflers but the cats will give a much lesser gain over these items. Otherwise, everything that follows applies to both cars.
Replacing the cats with sports items takes away roughly half the silencing of the stock exhaust - the standard cats do as much silencing as they do cleaning-up of the exhaust. This means that almost all the mufflers designed to work with the stock cats will sound either way too loud or just plain horrible with sports cats. (Some do like very loud exhausts though)! The usual answer therefore, if you're looking for max performance, is to go for a full matched system (headers, cats, mufflers) as they will normally have a reasonably balanced sound and will have been developed to give good power and torque throughout the rpm band. Examples are AWE, Fabspeed, Cargraphic, FVD, TechArt, Milltek, Remus & Europipe (and doubtless several others I've missed). Using a mix-&-match approach with sports cats (headers from 'A', cats from 'B', mufflers from 'C') can end up costing a lot of $$$s as the results can be unpredictable. However several of the guys on here have combos they like. I have a full AWE system. Sounds great and the performance increase is obvious - most of the others above will give similar results.
The flip side to the above is that most of the mufflers designed to work with 100/200-cell cats will sound incredibly tame when used with stock cats so you need to look in a different direction for mufflers to use in this configuration.
For just sound, with the stock cats, Tubis are crazy - especially combined with decent headers that give an even more 'tuned' note. I had this combo ion my car and it was stock quiet at cruise and in the parking lot but absolutely insane at WOT. AfterHours and Borla also make wonderful sounding mufflers for the car and Cargraphic does a 'loud' version designed to work with stock cats.
Hope you find a system that suits.