Standard chip or not ?

My 20VT on the road since Febuary and the performance is ok . Had a misfire on number 1 cylinder in the beginning and sorted that . So in the last week i could hear the boost leaking on the nearside front possible intercooler leak . So today i had a look and the top hose on the intercooler was just sitting on top with no jubilee clip . So i put one on and drove the car down the road . The boost is very agressive now as i have a feeling it may have been chipped . Loads of history with the car and no mention of modifacation .What writing does the fiat chip have on the chip ?

The standard original chips normally have a white sticker with Bosch logo + some other text, or an off-white (slightly yellow) sticker with just a 6 digit dot matrix style number printed on it. Rarely a standard original chip can have no sticker at all.

Even if the chip is not original and looks like a blank chip that someone has programmed, it may still have the standard code. Plenty of ECU's out there with non-original but standard chips that were fitted for fault finding or to return a car to standard or whatever.

So basically if it doesn't have one of those 2 types of original white stickers it could be anything, including a standard chip.

Thank you Graham i will take the ECU out this weekend to have a look Funny because i was going to buy one of your gtec chips . I am 100% it has been changed . The car is totally standard and the last owner was a doctor

I checked the waste gate the other day to see if it would move Moves freely . Fitted a boost gauge today and when i floor it the gauge goes straight to 18psi and then drops back to 14psi as it revs higher . So i would assume its not chipped ? Does that sound right .

Standard is 0,5bar in 2nd, 0,6bar in Any other gear.... you’ll have to google the PSI / BAR conversion

That said, your could still be chipped by the mapping on your chip doesn’t change the boost settings....it would be a little odd but not impossible....

If it helps, the Performance FC chip I have is branded, With a sticker - very hard to miss (had to check my ECU myself while troubleshooting a boost issue - pic HEREHERE).

The only way to be 100% sure is to buy a chip and get it fitted

Good luck

DS

Afterthought, you could always try replacing your ecu with a known standard ecu. If performance dips, you’ve got a chipped ecu, if performance is the same, you’re running a standard ecu.

Any member near you with a standard ecu you could borrow to test?

DS

Sounds about right for standard. Depends on the condition of the EBV and how the waste gate is adjusted though. I've seen chipped cars running that level of boost and standard cars running higher boost than that so just checking the boost by itself isn't a perfect way to work out what chip the ECU is running, although it can give an indication.



Only if something is broken.

Standard sustained boost (20vt) should generally be around 0.7 bar in 1st and 2nd due to the boost limiter and then 1.0 bar in other gears. Overboost for a second or two of around 0.2 to 0.3 bar higher than the sustained level is normal on most (but not all) standard 20vt coupes. Boost will gradually drop off in all gears above about 5.5K rpm due to the relatively small size of the standard turbo.

The only thing you can rely on is that not all identical coupes (even completely standard) will always behave exactly alike in boost characteristics. I've seen completely standard 20vt's running anything from 0.9 to 1.2 bar sustained boost and anything from 0 to 0.5 bar of overboost.

(Yes I know the ECU doesn't literally check the gear selected when limiting boost, we had this discussion recently already. )



You can't just swap over the engine ECU as it's coded to the immobiliser box. You'd need to swap the engine ECU, immobiliser ECU + chip in the key.

Could you up the boost on the gtec2 to 1.3 bar?