Supercharger vs Turbocharger

[burzumaske20]

in everyone's opinion,what do you like better?I am sure there are cons and pros for both of them.

I like superchargers, they seem less complicated and much easier to understand than a turbo, you can get a s/c in an rx8 but it's way more complicated and MUCH more expensive. that's why everyone does turbo. But judging from my friend who had a turbo saturn and my best friends ss/sc cobalt i understand the superchargers alot better.

[burzumaske20]

I have never been in a car that had a turbo only a 89 Ford Mustang GT that had a vortech supercharger,which was nice,I hear from other people though that a turbo if having a blow off valve and a inter-cooler it is suppose to produce more horsepower

That i'm not sure. my friend who installed his own turbo must have done it wrong, it wasn't getting correct boost and he blew his engine. He kept having to redo his exhaust because the turbo wasn't working, he had to go from a larger turbo to a smaller one. It really confused me. I'm used to seeing my best friend get like 11 lbs of boost, for example and my other friend was like i'm getting 4 lbs of boost with my turbo. And i'm like ok.. why so low isn't that bad? so i'm like way confused with turbos.

[blkbalt06]

a turbo is generally more efficient, because it uses expended energy and creates power. think about it, a turbo uses exhaust gases that otherwise would be vented to the atmosphere. a supercharger takes power to make power, ie-parasitic loss. now it doesnt take a whole lot to make the power, but still. with a turbo, you can control the amount of boost through a boost controller. with a supercharger, you're stuck with what the supercharger pulley gives you. in my opinion, its more ideal to turbocharge smaller, 4 cylinder engines, and supercharge the bulky v8's. just my .02

ahh that makes perfect sense. yes he did have aboost controller in his saturn and i never understood it. Thanks for explaining that, it makes perfect sense

[gibsonj4]

On a 4 cyclinder go with turbo. Doesn't take any power away from the engine and it's not limited by the supercharger size. There are thousands of trims, cfms, etc for turbos and superchargers u are limted for our engine because the M62 is a great fit for the 2.0 and the options are also limited. It takes power to make power with a SC but the power is always there throughout the power band.However, with a well fitted turbo, it can spool pretty quick around 2500 rpms and make power pretty quick as well. Turbo lag occurs when the turbo is too large for an engine and it takes longer for the turbo to spool the exaust gases.. I agree with blkbalt. Supercharged V8's are nasty. Take the new supercharged 6.3L ZR1 Vette. Look at the post under "other cars"

yeah but have they made a tune for the 2.2 cobalts? that was the biggest concern when i had my cobalt was the fact that there was no tune.

[gibsonj4]

Theres several options. Saying there is "no tuning" is not an accurate statement by a couple people. I'm going to do my tune with the AEM FIC unit. They use that on drift 350Zs and a couple other modified cars that are on the NHRA circuit. Go to AEM and read on the forum about the cobalt applications. Also, no one has looked into megasquirt but that might be an option.

[blkbalt06]

there is no tuning suite for the 2.2's still. you have the aem piggyback, megasquirt(dont really know much on that), and i believe thats about it. im not big on piggybacks but i suppose it could get the job done



damn you gibson!! you just beat me to it

blkbalt06 added 2 Minutes and 49 Seconds later...

gibson, if you know enough about megasquirt, could you possibly go into detail explaining what it is? this would help a lot of us out, including me.