How well does the new Intercooler Perform? We review the data and make some changes

Añadido: 2026-05-23

[00:00:13]now that I put a lot of miles on this intercooler and I got the initial road testing done, I can go over some of the data. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with how it performs. I've only had warm weather here in Florida. Uh it's been in the high 80s. Uh we've been in the 90s now this week. So, I don't have any cold weather data, but I'm not worried about that in the least because here I'm testing under what are going to be some of the worst conditions you're going to be driving in. So, if it's performing well in these conditions, you know, it's only going to get better when it's cold.

[00:00:43]Remember, this is a pretty stock car.

[00:00:45]The only modifications I have is the cold air intake and the catback exhaust.

[00:00:49]And if you watch my last dyno, the catback exhaust didn't give it any power. We're about to dyno the intake to see if it did give any, but it is going to be a different day under similar conditions. So, we'll see. I don't expect it to give much, if any. Uh maybe a couple. You get a spike of boost with us with the intake. But, as far as the rest of the car, this is stock. They run 10 lbs of boost from the factory. Uh if you're running sequential, it's like a 10 8 10 uh boost pattern during transition. So results will differ depending on how much boost you're running, the type of turbo, how efficient it is, uh a lot of different variables, but for a stock turbo upgrade, so far I'm happy.

[00:01:40]Full throttle runs at speed, this intercooler performs pretty well.

[00:01:45]You can see a difference between having the intercooler fan on and off. Uh we have a 69% efficiency of the core with the fan off and a 72% efficiency with the fan on. Some people think that's strange because at speed you'd think you'd have enough air flow, but uh we'll get into why that is in just a minute when I go over the uh ducting issues.

[00:02:06]When it came to the heat soak test of the intercooler, the fan proved to make a bigger difference in efficiency with the system. You see here we have a 56% efficiency with the fan off and a 63% efficiency with the fan on after repeat backtoback full throttle runs. Uh this seemed to stay consistent. I did this over multiple days, different temperatures uh only rising. The lowest temperature day I had testing is like 87°, but in the heat uh it seems to work very well. So 63% efficiency is pretty good for a uh air to air, let alone a intercooler in the engine bay.

[00:02:41]I'm still having a hard time tracking down some uh good comparison results with actual data behind it. But luckily uh I started a data harvesting thread on RX7 Club and Scotty 305 came out with this uh actual log data which is exactly what I'm looking for. This is a great comparison. Um stock twin car, stock boost just like mine, but he's running a stock intercooler.

[00:03:01]As you can see here, he did a single second gear pull and he saw a 15° increase. Um, the ambient temperature should be about the same as mine. Uh, somewhere in the 80s. It could be low 80s, high 80s. It doesn't really matter.

[00:03:16]Uh, mine was high 80s.

[00:03:20]If you look at my run, I did two backtoback runs all the way through third gear and I still did not reach those same temperatures at 115°. Mine got up to 112. So, this was after five complete full throttle gears and not just one as well. That is, in my opinion, a really good backto-back comparison of the stock mount versus my new stock mount.

[00:03:43]So, FDRX7s have two major things going against it when it comes to the stock mount intercooler. The location and the fresh air being fed to the intercooler.

[00:03:54]Since it's in the engine bay, it's essentially in an oven. It's going to be baked. We always talk about the heat soak. Um, that's always going to be a challenge when you're running a Vmount.

[00:04:03]you can have the intercooler in the engine bay uh without some of the detrimental effects as a stock mount because you have a different radiator placement and the hot air from the radiator fan is actually being pulled away from the intercooler, not blowing directly on it as with the stock mount.

[00:04:20]So, if you're running a stock mount intercooler, that is always going to be a challenge. I'm taking steps to further address this and make it even more efficient, which we'll get into here in a few minutes. But already as it sits, I'm happy with it.

[00:04:34]As far as the intake duct for the intercooler feeding fresh air to it, that is always going to be a challenge.

[00:04:41]The only way you can go around this is having an aftermarket bumper with a pretty ugly hole in it or going with like a custom radiator setup because the area it pulls fresh air in from the front of the car has to squeeze in between the radiator and the core support on the car and that's just not enough area to feed a larger intercooler core size.

[00:05:04]You can see the form factor of this duct right here. The radiator sits right about here. And unfortunately, that's also right around where the upper radiator core support is. So, you're actually pinched in between the radiator and the core support. So, the only way to really fix this is to replace it with a totally custom radiator that's probably another, you know, two or three or more inches shorter at least on that left side. So, you can actually widen this by that much more. then you can have the proper opening to surface area ratio of your intercooler. The sweet spot for feeding a heat exchanger, whether it be a radiator, oil cooler, intercooler, anything, is you want at least a 1/3 surface area intake for your fresh air duct to a uh full size radiator, whatever the heat exchanger is. So, you need at least third a third of the area for opening to feed fresh air into in order to properly cool that. So, when you upgrade to a larger stock mount intercooler, that just isn't possible with our size constraints we have with the car.

[00:06:13]Now, there's ways around this, and one of those, which Porsche has done in the past, they've gone with uh ducting that's smaller than a third, uh you have to create a man-made high low pressure areas that aren't natural to the actual air flow.

[00:06:30]If you look at the factory intercooler, there's no fan on it. you're depending 100% on the air flow from the front of the car to feed that intercooler.

[00:06:38]And while at speed it seems to work pretty well, but when you upgrade in larger surface area, you can't naturally get enough air flow at even at highway speed to properly feed the core.

[00:06:52]Not to mention, if you have your radiator fans going, you have the air passing through the radiator, and you're creating a high pressure zone in the engine bay itself, which is pushing back against the back of the intercooler. So, you have to look at the two areas, the front side and the back side of the intercooler, as different pressure areas. You want a high pressure on the front side and a low pressure on the back. That way the high pressure is pushing the cool air through the core and the low pressure is help evacuating the air out of the intercooler.

[00:07:24]If you have one of the Australian PWR intercoolers from Marcus, I believe this is a known issue just from what I've seen posted on the forums and in other discussions lately. As shown here in a comment from my testing video, this person showed air intake temperatures over 170° F. I have not been able to get mine above 130° after repeat runs under sustained boost in similar ambient temperatures. He was on stock twins, but running more boost than me as well.

[00:07:52]Another factor could have been his intake design, which will bring me to another discussion point later in the video. Now, this does not mean that Marcus' intercooler is bad. I know for a fact that PWR makes great heat exchangers. I think the problem lies in what I just explained about the ducting, and I believe Marcus is also aware of this. I don't think his old ducks can properly feed enough air with vehicle speed alone. It needs some extra help from a fan or an evacuation duct on the back side of the intercooler to create a large high and low pressure differential on each side of the core. He has recently changed the design of the intercooler duct with a larger inlet portion as shown here in this forum post. His old duct was 45 mm tall, which would fit over the typical radiators we install in these cars, while his new one is 60 mm tall, which will not fit over the top of most of the radiators from the looks of it. This person had to use a PWR radiator in order to make it fit.

[00:08:47]So, it may not work with the Coyo N flow or other typical upgraded radiators.

[00:08:51]Taking the rough dimensions of what I know about this intercooler, his old ratio is 22% of the intercooler core surface area, while his new duct is now about 30%. Which is right around optimal for flow without additional aid. So, if you do have one of Marcus' older intercooler kits, I would recommend fabricating a properly sealed fan to aid the duct in order to flow enough air to fully utilize the intercooler's potential. I would like to see how well the new larger duct performs at speed and if this person that commented on my testing video would see drastic drops in temperature from just replacing the duct. So, here's what I got going on for the intercooler to address the heat soak and the radiant heat from the radiator.

[00:09:33]Big shout out to my guy at uh Engine Armor. He does all my powder coating.

[00:09:38]And this is kind of like a test thing.

[00:09:40]Uh my theory behind this is I wanted to do a ceramic thermal barrier on these external surfaces like this and then this black is a heat dispersant. So I do this on the core and the top. Um my logic behind this is try to keep as much heat out of this aluminum from the external radiant heat as possible and then increasing the efficiency with this with the actual cool air going through. I know for a fact this stuff works. I used it on the 240 radiator and it's saw a significant improvement. Um, and we did run for years without it. Had the coating and it's night difference. So, I know this stuff works well. I'm super happy we're going to be able to actually calculate um the difference this whole coating is going to make. Um, the question is whether or not doing the barrier is the right decision or if I should do this whole thing in like a heat dispersant. Now, my thought is if you do the whole thing in a heat dispersant, it works both ways. So, it'll absorb heat more efficiently and it'll disperse it more efficiently. So, if I use it on this area and you're blowing hot radiator air on this, then my thought is it's going to soak it up that much faster. Um, so that's why I want to try to block it. But the owner of Engine Armor let me know. He said he would strip this for free and recoat the whole thing in heat dispersant so I can test the difference. So, big again, shout out to him. He's a cool guy. He's just as interested in this data as me to see if these uh codings really work. So, I'm going to have the data show bare like you saw in the first videos. We're going to have this um going to install this on the dyno. You're going to see how this works. I'll do some street testing uh so we can compare some numbers. I'm going to pull it back out, give it back to him to recote the whole thing and hold heat dispersant and then we can have like a backto-back comparison. It's in the low 90s here in Florida right now. So, um it's going to be that way for the rest of the summer most likely. So, I'm going to have some good direct comparisons um between the coatings. That way, we have some uh real world data. And that way, I can make a final decision of what I want to make um for the final product. If I want to do this kind of block, if I want to do full heat disperscent, and uh we get to play around and uh see what's going to work the best. So, I'm excited to test this out and we'll uh see if uh theory actually plays out.

[00:12:01]big thing to take into consideration is your intake you're running. You'll see me call it a hot air intake. Um, not a fan of them. They sound really cool and I kind of do miss the noises, but people do do bare filters within the engine bay. Um, and you're just starting behind the curve. I I would say when it comes to cooling your intake temps because here, this thing draws from the front of the car. It's not the best um because it's not a 99 spec. It doesn't have the ram air, but this still draws from the front of the car and you're getting essentially ambient temperature from your uh the front of your car, your bumper here. Uh this is a pretty good insulator. It's not like aluminum where it'll leech in and uh help heat up your air.

[00:12:48]So, what I did here was I installed a intake sensor uh temp sensor into the uh stream so we can get some data off the stock intercooler. You'll see that coming up. And I put the other one here.

[00:13:03]This is the other intake uh temp sensor that's would be on the other side of the intercooler, but there's no real good place to put it um on a stock intercooler without risking something. I don't know if it'll hold real well in any of the plastic uh piping or whatnot, but we'll get some data. But this is a good data point here because it's going to measure the under hood temperature, the air that your filters would typically suck up. So, you can see um we can, you know, pretty much see the ambient temperature add a couple degrees probably just because it's going to have some radiant heat from here. But take that versus um what you're going to start behind the curve sucking in the actual engine bay air. And uh we can see how far behind the curve you're uh starting versus having a true cold air intake.

[00:13:54]All right, here's a show. Everything's working. Uh fresh out of the garage.

[00:13:59]It's about 89° today. So both temperature sensors are reading about right. is probably the temperature of the garage. The inlet is going to be the engine bay temperature and the outlet is going to be the actual outlet temperature of the uh intercooler. So, we'll see what it gets to.

[00:14:21]So, I've been cruising around um just purposefully not trying to heat up the engine bay. And here's the temperatures we have.

[00:14:30]uh already 146°. So that's above, you know, that's about 60 55 or 60° above ambient today. So if you had those uh open air filters in your engine bay, you'd already be uh you know, above 50° hotter than you will with like a cold air intake. Uh don't mind this gauge.

[00:14:55]That's just out of curiosity. Maybe I have that plumbed into the uh pressure chamber for the sequential twins. I just curious on how it acts and holds pressure and whatnot. Just I just have that kind of mind and like to play with stuff like that. But so you can see just cruising. Um it's pretty hot in the engine bay. And uh this is one reason why I preach so much about going against the hot air intakes. So we'll see how hot we can get the uh intercooler here real quick with just a a one gear pool.

[00:15:33]Yep.

[00:15:36]So, you can see that's a second gear pull just like uh Scotty and RX7 Club.

[00:15:45]And we hit I think around 135.

[00:15:50]Engine bay temps didn't really rise. So, I think this is going to be like your standard engine bay temperature.

[00:16:02]Main reason why I wanted to include that intake placement uh as part of this video is because it's pretty pertinent to the actual data we're looking at, as in the case of the person that commented on my last YouTube video whose intake temps were up in the 170s with the Australian one. I don't know what kind of intake he's using. And honestly, I don't know if the rise in pre-turbo temperature will directly correlate to after turbo temperature once compressed.

[00:16:30]Um, but it's possible that if you start with temperatures 50° higher pre-turbo that you might end up with temperatures 50° higher after the turbo, which is like I said, you're already getting behind the curve when it comes to cooling your intake air temps and making it that much harder on your intercooler.

[00:16:48]Now, without testing and doing a lot of calculations and whatnot, it may not be a one:1 translation of, you know, 50° pre-turbo equals 50° after turbo. It might only be a portion of that, but either way, you're starting with hotter air. You're compressing hotter air, and you're only making your system work that much harder. This is why I preach so much about the proper intake for these.

[00:17:11]And with how sensitive rotaries are to detonation and with the placement of our stock mount intercoolers, I try to do as much as possible to combat high intake temps.

[00:17:23]So stay tuned. I'm hoping to get this thing on the dyno pretty soon. What you're going to see is I'm going to dyno the car as it sits with the factory stock mount intercooler, the intake, and we'll get a baseline on that. And then while it's on the dyno, I'm going to install my new uh stock mount intercooler. We're going to dyno it back to back, same conditions, same day. That way, we can see some real world numbers and see what it actually does. Um, I consider it recovered horsepower. It's not. We're creating horsepower. Uh, the turbos are the horsepower creators. The intercooler is pretty much just recovering that horsepower they make.

[00:17:58]And, uh, it's more of a reliability mod.

[00:18:01]It's making safer horsepower.

[00:18:03]And then after we do a couple dinos and get a comparison between those two, I'm going to install the Armagic igniter and hopefully that'll make a difference and then that way you can actually see if this thing's worth the money. Um, I'm hoping so. Like I said, I've done HKS Twin Power in the past and it's been good. But, uh, this is something you can still buy brand new. I was lucky enough to snag one and, uh, I guess we're going to see what it does on the dyno. Uh, temperatures here are going to be in the 90s throughout the rest of the summer, I think. Uh, I'm expecting to dyno in the '9s again, so it's going to be a hot day. You're going to see what this setup does um in essentially bad conditions.

[00:18:43]So, if it's doing good and bad conditions, and it can only get better in cooler conditions, right? So, um, let me know what you guys think. Uh, I'm excited to get on the dyno and, uh, make more progress. And I'll be doing more videos comparing the factory with the new stock mount intercooler since I have the new temperature sensor and the stock mount intercooler. And then after the dyno, I'm also going to be testing out the coatings from uh engine armor. That way we can see if the uh ceramic heat barrier works better than the uh heat dispersant when it comes to coating the outside. So again, real life data. Um, happy to share it with you guys and uh I'm excited to see what this thing does.