Performance Chips & Programmers Research Guide

Back in the muscle car days, tweaking on the carburetor settings and distributor advance curves could yield huge horsepower gains. Today though, the fuel injection, ignition, and hundreds of other functions that used to be adjusted with a screwdriver are all controlled by computers. So tweaking has been replaced by geeking as computers now do all the work. Auto performance chips and truck performance chips fit all the tricks of the old-time tuners onto a single computer chip, remapping your engine’s systems to give you more power and more torque. High-quality auto performance chips and truck performance chips optimize the fuel/air ratio and spark map in your engine for the enthusiast driver. You still get great fuel mileage and clean emissions from a performance chip, but the engine operates at its full potential. You’re accessorizing your truck to stand out, so why use a stock engine chip designed for an average driver?

The performance chip (also known as “power programmer” and “performance programmer”) works as a replacement for an ECU (Engine Control Unit) chip that holds an engine’s lookup tables. The aforementioned tables found in the performance chip contain values that translate to higher fuel rates during certain driving conditions. For example, the new lookup tables may supply more fuel while at full throttle and at every engine speed. The spark timing may also be altered as a result of this. Since manufacturers of performance-chip makers are not as focused on issues like reliability, mileage and emissions controls as the car-makers are, they tend to utilize more aggressive settings in the fuel maps of their performance chips.