aFe intake
Honestly, (not pointing at anyone in particular), I cant take ANY shop/business/tuner that sells AFE or similar type of products seriously as a tuner. Guys who want to make their cars faster should look for those with tuning experience so they can not waste money on fast and furious type of mods. Its no sin for a company to want to make money by selling anything and everything but those who want to make their cars faster should look for shops with tuning background and experience.
We were just at Mfest and during the Tuner challenge 80% of the cars dropped out after the 4th-5th lap. Our car was among 5 cars (started with over 20 cars) that kept going........and ours was the most consistent. Not one car that ran good had any type of silly intake like what AFE sells.
We were just at Mfest and during the Tuner challenge 80% of the cars dropped out after the 4th-5th lap. Our car was among 5 cars (started with over 20 cars) that kept going........and ours was the most consistent. Not one car that ran good had any type of silly intake like what AFE sells.
From his post above, he's saying the BMC filters for the 135, 335, and 535 don't perform any better than the stock filter so he said to use the stock ones for those cars but for the NA cars like your 530, the BMC filters work good.
The 530i BMC filter works well. On the N54 motor, although the filter itself flows better than the stock one on a test bench, installed, its a different story. I dynoed the filter vs stock and it lost about 1-2whp. While on the dyno, I put the stock one on, ran it again and the power came back up. I did this 4 times. Then I left the BMC on the car for 2 weeks, put it back on the dyno and swapped them back and forth several times on the dyno to confirm. Each time, the stock filter made 1-3whp more. I contact the company about it and it said that the ecu needs to be calibrated for the filter to make more power. I laughed and said, "no thanks."
They always do. And most of them have NEVER tuned a car in their life. In most cases, with the wrong mods like this, the performance is worse. Your ECU has a certain amount of adjustments it can make to adapt to type of fuel, temp, etc. When it pulls as much timing as it can, add fuel, limit power, etc. and the problem is not fixed, thats when people experience the CEL that they get with these intakes. So, while you might be in a situation that you DONT get the CEL, you are still limiting the power because your ECU is making adjustments to try and fix the high IAT problems. 

...but what's CEL and IAT again?
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Contributors
Joined: May 2007
Posts: 658
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From: Washington D.C.
My Ride: 5series
Model Year: 2004
I had an afe intake in my car, complete garbage, noticed a loss in power in the lower rpms. Now i have the rpi scoop and the k&n drop-in filter. Do you guys think the BMC filter is any better than the K&N?


