I can honestly say before last week, i never knew these off the shelf plug in tuning modules even existed. Perhaps that's a good thing as they definitely seem to good to be true given the fact that an uprev tune only delivers half the promised power at several times the price.

So does anyone have any direct experience or knowledge with these? Are there certain cars where its safe to use and beneficial and some to avoid?

At this point I'm willing to give a go with my old beater Honda, but not quite ready for my G to be the guinea pig..

https://www.performancechiptuning.co...-for-infiniti/

Edit: $29 bucks for 20 HP

https://www.thortonchiptuning.com/pr...formance-chip/

 

I would avoid those generic units at all costs. More often than not, they are just a placebo. Mighty car mods tried one of those 'chips'. It did absolutely nothing.
One way I've always used to check if a business is legit is the address. The first one you have linked has ZERO address listed that I can find. The second source you have linked has an address that is a UPS store....
IMO don't buy crap on the internet that can ruin your car.
Uprev is probably the best way to go. They tune each car individually, so you get the best performanc. My second choice is probably a Hypertech, only because at some point someone tuned a G35 and came up a product and dyno sheets to prove, and you can see in the link below it corrects the AFR a bit in some places.
https://dynosty.com/2013/01/09/g35-u...ne-comparison/

 

I ordered a cold air intake kit from them. The package when it arrived was damaged with parts missing. They sent me a whole new kit within 2 days. No questions asked. Just sent a few pics of damaged box. No experience with the chips tho. Good luck!

 

Some of these merely bypass the Intake Temp Sensor in order to adjust the amount of fuel injected. That can do weird crap to an engine, mess with fuel trim and potentially lean burn some of your parts, which I'm sure you don't want to do. While it may be able to actually give you the 20HP it claims, it would be so short lived that the resulting engine damage wouldn't be worth it.

Bite the bullet, go UpRev

 

Thanks for the comments.. Yes i'd agree, running leaner plus adding timing is probably how these things work (if they do anything at all) so not a good idea unless you have monitoring equipment on standby to shut down when needed.

Not really looking to go uprev as my car is stock.

 

I hooked up a Bluetooth OBD2 and connected it to Torque(full version) on my phone. It was a cold evening here and from what I could see on the gauges I setup the car was running fairly well. Intake air temps were around 50 degrees, and timing was around 25 degrees with a max of 29 under near full load. The thing that surprised me was the A/F ratio. It seemed to be very lean. Under part throttle acceleration it didn't budge from 14.7, and stayed in the 14's even under 50% or more throttle until I hit 6000rpm, then it dropped into the low 13's from what I could see. I'm wondering if I could have some un-metered air coming in from somewhere?

I do have a CSV log file if anyone is interested and able to read it.

 

Lower number indicates rich, not lean. At higher piston velocities (ie higher rpm) it's possible to have uneven distribution of fuel in your cylinder, so the ecu will go a little rich to compensate. Extra fuel can also cool the cylinder (due to evaporation) in order to advance timing without causing knocking.

 

Right, I never got into any lower numbers. It was by and large always in the 14's until RPMs were well up in the rev range.