Little additional info about my car. My car currently has 73k miles not 80k and I bought it as a stock CPO car at 61k miles. So it was healthy motor when I bought it. During my 12k mile ownership, the dealer repaired water pump and coolant leak along with other minor things with warranty coverage. So something happened after the tunings. Since I went through different tuners and software, I'm not sure and don't want to tell which one caused the fail. It also could be a mechanical fail but I doubt it. Like I said earlier post things can happen even on stock cars. Play with it on your own and I don't want to see this misfortune again from anyone.

 

CPO is nothing more than Porsche running it through their shop, doing an oil change and checking brakes. The motor is in no way evaluated. Its a false sense of security and a free warranty. It also tells nothing about how the car was taken care of prior to them getting it on trade.

 

Our calibrations are heavily encrypted, so unless your tuner took the time to crack the encryption and show you what the maps looked like, I am afraid he was not entirely honest with you. We absolutely do not "ride the knock sensors." Especially not more than a OEM calibration which corrects 11-12 degrees. We do use the knock sensors, just like the OEM program does. Knock tables are there for a reason and we do not desensitize the knock sensors ability to react to noise, which is unsafe. To create a calibration where the knock sensors never react on OEM settings, would be leaving quite a bit of power on the table and could even create less power than stock. On the other hand, zero knock correction in logs does not mean that there isn't knock. There are many tuners in the market who will play with (reduce) the sensitivity of the knock sensors or even reduce the amount of sound frequencies that they react to (this is also reducing knock sensor sensitivity, just a fancy way of saying it). This would show that the car appears to have no knock, when in reality, it just isn't reacting to it. That just isn't our philosophy.

Further, I am not sure where you're seeing rod failures with GIAC software (this thread has nothing to do with GIAC). We have some customers who experienced rod compression based on the power that they wanted to make with their own car. However, even pushing nearly 850 hp and 900 ft. /lbs. of torque, the tuning was precise enough to keep the stock engine in one piece for well over 3 years at that power level. We have quite a few other customers running custom AWE 750R packages with methanol injection pushing over 800hp (640 AWHP / 650 AWTQ on a mustang MD500) on pump fuel and meth, and have done so for more than 5 years. These are customers who wanted built engine power on a stock engine and were willing to improve the strength of the engine internals in the event of a failure. Normal calibrations from GIAC will not cause this type of rod compression.

My apologies to the OP for the threadjack, I am not sure where that tuner's opinion came from, but our logs will show that we keep the knock sensors very sensitive and reactive (which is safe). There are tuners in the market that will desensitize the sensor so badly, the might as well be removed entirely. We have flashed thousands upon thousands of 997s in the 8 years we've offered software for them. If we were doing unsafe things with such a prestigious vehicle, we would be long gone from the market by now.

 

This is another experienced opinion on what these cars can take if done and tuned properly and I have much respect for the team at GIAC. I have been working with them for years and they are one of the tuners that I can sleep well at night using. Another testimony to 600-800hp stock motors that hold strong.

 

Hi Austin, I'm sure your program has worked well for many others. I just wanted to share my specific experience with real data with the community.

I'm stating the fact that my custom tune on Cobb is better than your packaged GIAC tune that came with the car, as the support for my theory that not all tunes are the same, and that some faith in your tuner is required.

As far as what my tuner told me, yeah, I have more proof for you:
1) The car had audible pings while on the dyno with your tune (on 91 CA gas, and probably less than ideal airflow)

2) Yes. Before I had the Cobb ECU, my tuner decrpyted and flashed the OEM ECU. I don't know if he had to decrypt yours first or erase yours first then flashed another map. So I went through Giac -> custom flash -> custom Cobb. I wouldn't have gone through such trouble if your tuning was even ok to begin with. I even went through the trouble to pay you guys $900 just to have an updated map first (I bought the car with your tune already installed, with $5K or so of receipts).

I'd be happy to post the before/after dyno sheets from Giac to current. and various Giac receipts. The improvement justified all trouble/money spent to replace the tune.

To the OP, again, a custom tune with the new engine is better than some off the shelf tune.

 

I won't get into it further beyond this, however, you should know that GIAC has options for literally every combination of hardware with stock turbos. We can max out the fueling system with stock turbos on some of the revisions we have available. All it takes is communication from the end user and GIAC to see what is available for the specific combination they have. Just because you had a GIAC tune, doesn't mean you had one that was maximizing the benefit of the parts. I still stand by my statements about knock sensor values as well. Custom tuners have a vested interest in pushing your car to get numbers, if they want to get paid, no matter what that entails. In the end, if you're happy that is all that matters.

 

while i agree with the some of your post for the most part. i found this statement interesting...

anyone with a durametric can go out and log their car. log timing, log fuel, knock, targets and boost etc. that info will give the person an idea of what the car is doing base don boost, timing requests etc. not sure why ECU has to be decrypted to see what the tune is doing.

 

I don't think Durametric can log a car with a GIAC tune - that's what I was told when I was purchasing my 68s and considering the tune options.

 

of course it can.

 

there is no way they would lock that out. its essential to trouble shooting the car and we all know modded cars need trouble shooting from time to time.

 

Perhaps he mis-stated his hearsay, but it sounded like the tuner was trying to tell him what we were trying to accomplish based on how the car was tuned. This would require cracking our encryption, which would take a relatively large amount of time. He could've also been looking at the dummy maps that we leave in the DME for people who are trying to sniff at our calibrations.

Logging is relevant to a point, assuming the car is performing in full health, and performing like it should. You can definitely get a snapshot of what the car is doing, but that doesn't mean it's what it should be doing. Further, we've released 3 different versions of software for the 997.1 Turbo. Older versions were much less aggressive than the latest offerings.

 

Strange, I actually couldn't log with durametric when I had GIAC. I couldn't even view any of the live values when the car was running. I can now though (with durametric). Maybe I was doing something wrong or that version of durametric was somehow not compatible with the GIAC flash

 

That's definitely not true. We typically use either a PIWIS or the GIAC datalogger here in-house for troubleshooting and tuning, but I recommend Durametric to all of my customers who want to have that ability themselves. I have never heard a single person complain of not being able to log their car with Durametric.

 

Looks like I was misinformed. This was the info I was given when I was considering trying out the GIAC tune on my 68s.

 

Out of curiosity, who told you that? You can PM me if you'd prefer to take it offline.