oldnavy wrote:
The aftermarket aircleaner's will do little for EGT's and only increase dirt in engine oil, we went through all that testing several years ago on the TDI Club Forum. The removal of the muffler and adding a straight through muffler or a straight pipe reduced the EGT's on the TDI VW's by 20 to 30% and is why I went with no muffler when I upgraded to the big injectors, tweaked the timing, IQ and a few other VAG-COM tricks, along with Stage II RC.
Agreed. Personally, I was surprised that everyone jumped on the AFE Proguard bandwagon so quickly. I mentioned it so that people determined to try something like this would at least know there was something out there several orders of magnitude better than a K&N.
On the GM Duramax filter test you linked to, the AFE filter with the 73-XXXX part number is probably a Proguard 7 filter. From their part number index, all the Proguard 7 filters look to start with a 73 prefix.
Looking at the numbers, it did surprisingly well for a high flow reuseable filter. The one category where it really fell on it's face was how long it took to clog up, and the amount of dirt it took to do that. While on the one hand that's good news, it's actually stopping dirt, unless you were religious about keeping it clean you'd soon be worse off than with a stock filter. And it still passed 5 times as much dirt as an AC Delco.
By comparison, the AC Delco went for 3 times as long (60 minutes) and stopped 573 grams of dirt before it met their criteria (10" H20 differential) for being clogged. 573 grams is over a POUND of dirt, over half a kilo! And it only passed 4 tenths of 1 gram of dirt.
The AFE filter looks like a decent compromise filter, really designed for the Cummins and Powerstroke crowd that ARE working their engines hard, pulling heavy trailers and seeing high intake air flows, but still needing decent filtration. I called my friend in Texas, and repeated the one comment on the test, about when we were actually going to see 350 cfm intake air flows. He immediately shot back "My Cummins whenever I pull my toyhauler trailer".
For most people, who install an air filter and forget about it for the next 10,000 miles, and are just doing normal highway commuting, the AC Delco would seem to be the best choice.