What's wrong with Jet Perf. Chips?
 

I was just getting ready to order an Jet Performance chip for my 97 EXP when a friend of mine suggested I check out this website first. I had planned on adding a K&N drop in filter and the chip as my first mods of this vehicle, but I see people here prefer the Superchip. Could someone explain the differences, or point me in a direction where I can find this out for myself?

BTW I have the 4.6 ltr. auto 4X4

Whats wrong with jet chips?
 

I personally have had no experiences with this brand of chip.
However, after choosing a Superchip for both my Supercrew,and my Lightning, I would find it hard to believe that there could be anything better.
I also came to these boards to gain information on what to do with both of the trucks I mentioned. It was unanamious here that Superchips were the favorite.
Do yourself a favor and call Mike Troyer at 540-862-9515 and talk to him. If I am not mistaken, besides being one of the most knowledgeable persons I have ever met on getting every bit of performance from our trucks, he is the oldest standing providers of Superchips in the country.

Marc

It's not "what is wrong" with the Jet chip. It is, rather, that you can do far better with your tuning chip dollar than Jet. Without question jet does an admirable job of advertising its product.

The Jet chip is only effective at WOT (full throttle) whereas the Superchip is effective at all throttle positions.

Jet has only one chip for say all 2000's with the 5.4 motor, whereas Superchip has a tuning program for the specific computer revision that your truck has. For example: you and I might both own 2000 f-150's with the 5.4 motor, but they may very likely have different PCM revisions.

I have a Superchip in both of my trucks and am very happy with the performance.

Mike the "Superchips Distributor" I'm sure can better explain the complexities of the Superchip than I. In fact if you were to grab his number from his signature and call him, I think he could give all the detail you could want on Superchips or any other performance topic you might have. He has helped me plenty.

Thanks for the info. I went and checked out his website and fgound it to be MUCH more useful then Jet. Also, I was very unaware of the fact that the Jet only worked at W.O.T. as compared to the schip. I am looking for an improvment throught the whole throttle range. I will definately look into the superchip when it comes time to purchase my mods.

Thanks Again:)

Hi douggr,

Looks like you've already gotten some great advice there from the previous responses, excellent!

BY the way, it's not just Jet, but Hypertech and almost all other performance chips too, they only tune the engine during what is called open loop operation, which is basically only during extremely heavy to wide-open throttle operation, so that's the only time they even have any *potential* for improving engine power. That is done primarily because of a little known loophole in the emissions laws, during open-loop operation there are no emissions standards that have to be met! So you can literally do anything you want to tuning at full throttle & sail thru emissions certification. So it's much easier & also far cheaper to tune like that, but you also get a poor result.

The other problem is that they are almost all "generic" in nature as well, as another poster mentioned. For example, only 1 program for all 1998 4.6 automatic F-150's, where there are literally hundreds of different PCM revisions each model year alone in these F-150's. This "generic" tuning can result in, if you're lucky and your vehicle's original factory program revision is close enough to what's in the chip, *maybe* a 6-8 hp gain in a 5.4 motor, or you could lose 3-5 horsepower just as easily, literally.

With the Superchip, your vehicle is tuned & programed exactly according to it's individual PCM software revision, and it's tuned for maximum horsepower & torque *all* the time, at any throttle position as well as at any rpm, and it's still 50-state emissions certified. That is something that literally nobody else in the world has done or can do, only Superchips does that. It's much more expensive and requries many orders of magnitude more raw R&D, but it's the *only* way to properly optimize the powertrain programming/tuning of each and every single vehicle.

We can help you not only with the tuning of your vehicle, but we also specialize in all aspects of improving the performance of these F-trucks, so if you ever need to go over anything performance-related or pick up performance parts, etc., please feel free to give us a call, we handle it all, basically. :)

Good luck with your truck,