The 'OMG Total Tuning Noob' Thread

[Tazzi]

On the next issue of Tazzi's adventures, is Tuning!
I dont have much knowledge or experience in tuning, but, as Im sure everyone knows.. I like to ramble on while Im learning, helps gets ideas down that I can come back to later

Iv found you can only learn so much through a shitload of reading, tutorials, demonstrations and youtube videos. But eventually practice makes perfect so to begin this journey, Im now looking into purchasing into some of the commercial tuning equipment.

The two main candidates:
1. HPTuners
2. Efilive

I find HPtuners 'visually' easier to understand and navigate. But apart from that, does anyone have experiences or knowledge that may influence which package to purchase?

I will literally be watching and reading all the possibly information for tuning. Starting with pcmhacking's very own tuning documents. I guess as I move along, Ill post to interesting topics, books, rescources and thing else that seems useful. Im sure every answer I get will cause more questions

[Jayme]

I learnt ls1 stuff on efilive and so prefer it now! but they can both do almost the same stuff, except HPT has the ability to stuff your VE And Spark tables into RAM and realtime tune them on a stock 411 pcm !! so I think hpt is win.

[Gareth]

I find HPtuners 'visually' easier to understand and navigate.

agree totally, thats what I based my purchase on

I will be following this thread with great interest

[Holden202T]

only have experience on a real car with HPT and its done everything I ever needed on my holden cruze, and most everything on my VZ Ute (apparently it support transmission now that I don't own the ute anymore).

so I can say HPT is good and works fine, but I cannot provide anything on EFILive.

[antus]

I was a big fan of EFI Live v.7.5.x, but now they are forcing an update to v8 and Im not so sure about the interface on that. I would still call them the winner if they had stick to the 7.5 UI. In the mean time HPT v.2.25.x which is beta is looking like a nice set of refinements over 2.24 rather than a complete redesign so I think maybe they have just edged out in front in recent times.

[vlad01]

only have experience in TP really.

was looking into MS back in the day but didn't go ahead with MS

[Tre-Cool]

I have both, had efilive longer as such have invested more $$ in it over my hpt cable.

Efilive has always supported the Virtual VE table in the later model cars where as hpt chose not to and dumbed it down with their own hacked up ve table. This was problematic for them as they had to do it for each OS that GM released, eventually they stopped doing it and people had to rely on a 3rd party tool to it. Though apparently 2.25 fixes this?

Regardless the scanner flexibility on efilive is far greater than hpt, i.e you can customize and add filters, pids etc to datalogs after you have recorded logs. HPT can't.
efilive can also highlight data in the editor that you have selected in the scanner. again hpt can't do this, you would not believe how much you will miss this with other software once you used it.

v8 complete of efilive is still a bit off anyway, the editor/scanner function I still use v7.5 along with uploading to ls1,e38,t43 etc

[Tazzi]

I have both, had efilive longer as such have invested more $$ in it over my hpt cable.

Efilive has always supported the Virtual VE table in the later model cars where as hpt chose not to and dumbed it down with their own hacked up ve table. This was problematic for them as they had to do it for each OS that GM released, eventually they stopped doing it and people had to rely on a 3rd party tool to it. Though apparently 2.25 fixes this?

Regardless the scanner flexibility on efilive is far greater than hpt, i.e you can customize and add filters, pids etc to datalogs after you have recorded logs. HPT can't.
efilive can also highlight data in the editor that you have selected in the scanner. again hpt can't do this, you would not believe how much you will miss this with other software once you used it.

v8 complete of efilive is still a bit off anyway, the editor/scanner function I still use v7.5 along with uploading to ls1,e38,t43 etc

Ahh right. This is an interesting difference.
Definitely something to keep into mind.

[Jayme]

I spose fords are worth mentioning too. Hptuners can tune the Falcon/xr6t engines. Efilive cant.

[Tazzi]

I spose fords are worth mentioning too. Hptuners can tune the Falcon/xr6t engines. Efilive cant.

Sold

Iv got some Ford stuff here, wouldnt mind tinkering with that too.