My buddy has a 97 F250 Crew Cab w/ PS Diesel, and for some reason a guy at a diesel performance shop is telling him that in his year truck, he will get better performance with a chip instead of a tuner. He said the gains are better.

I thought maybe it was because he didn't sell tuners or something like that, but he sells it all.

Is it true, and if so why is the chip better for his application?

 

Hi rbraughn,

If he's talking about the Superchips product, that *used* to be true but only for a very short period, and now no longer is the case.

There are a couple potential areas he may be referring to.......

One is the fact that for the first couple years Superchips made chips for the PSD's, we had to use "boost tubes" along with the Superchip module so as to be able to increase the boost level on certain model years - that was all done away with years ago, and the boost tube is no longer needed. But back then the Micro Tuner did not exist yet for the PSD.

The 1st generation of PSD's, which are the 1994.5 thru 1998 models inclusive, are not intercooled, and thus they do gain a little less power from the tuning changes as compared to the '99 & newer PSD's, which are all intercooled - that happens no matter if they use the chip or the Micro Tuner. There are also some differences in the gear ratios in the automatic transmissions that affect performance, the 1st gen PSD's have a shorter 1st gear & too-tall 2nd gear - that was fixed in 1999 & newer models.

For a little while during the past year or so, there were some programs available for the Superchip modules that were not in the Micro Tuners - perhaps that is what he was talking about - and during that time, only a very few dealers were allowed to have those programs, and even then only for testing purpose, specifically for fuel mileage testing, which we did for Superchips - they wanted to know how the new highest-power programs were affecting mpg in various vehicles, and we ran those tests with some customers of ours - dealers, actually. But it hasn't been like that for a few months now, since the update that turned the 1705 into a 3-program unit instead of a 2-program unit - and that happened a few months ago. Ever since then, there is no disparity in the power gains from the various programs between module versus Micro Tuner.

Now one thing that I think is important is that the 1994.5 & 1995 PSD's, even though they all use an EEC-V flash-style PCM, are *not* fully OBD-II compatible - thus in the past, sometimes the Micro Tuner worked OK on those years and sometimes it did not, because the vehicle itself wasn't fully OBD-II compatible - there were some changes in the newest 1705 MT's that helped with that, but we still tell owners of 1994.5 & 1995 PSD's to use the traditional Superchip module versus the Micro Tuner so they *can't* have any potential issue because they aren't fully OBD-II compatible until the 1996 model year.

The bottom line is, at this point in time for any 1996-2003 7.3L PSD, the Micro Tuner is the way to go, as it has all the highest power programs that it previously did not have for a short time.

I hope that info helps, & give us a call if you'd like to go over any of this in more detail.

 

Thanks Mike,

I knew I could count on you for an explanation.

I already gave him a printout of your web site and the different chips and tuners you have.

I bought my gasoline tuner from you and was telling him to deal with you.

Hopefully after he reads this, he will wise up

Thanks again

 

Hi rbraughn,

Well, it's very easy to get some of this confused, especially when there is on-going development & changes in programs like that - makes it even harder to keep up with all the specs, details, etc.

Best of luck to your friend whatever he decides, & thanks very much to you for your consideration.