im buying a pcm

do i want to buy the brand new one, or should i send it in?

what do you die-hards suggest

I bought a core from Morads for $65.00 complete and they shipped to Intense. Intense then did their thing and shipped to me for 100.00. I was then able to keep driving and keep original PCM which work out good for me because I have a problem with the PCM they sent me and I swapped back to my OEM.
They are sending me another PCM and after I install if all is good I'll ship the first one back.
This all happened in past 2 Weeks.
Intense was very good about offering to ship another quickly. But, if I didn't have OEM one I would have had to drive the car with driveability issues. For now the Riv is my primary transportation. Working on my winter vehicle now.

well, i mean about shift points...timing and what to have them tune it to

They have what they call a Standard tune. Look at their website, I think it explains it better than I could. Standard is good for stock engines and engines with some mod's. I know it woke my engine up quite a bit and all i have done was gutted airbox. Then with PCM install, I install one of their 180* thermostat's, Highly recommended because they change fan settings to come on for 180*. There are many other programming changes they do also, Fuel and timing curves, etc.
I called and spoke directly with Todd Allen @ Intense before I ordered and he was helpful in explaining all changes that would be made based on my current configuration of mod's and future mod's. His Number is 614-873-6499 Ext. 108. Tell him you heard about him from this site. Site address is www.intense-racing.com

Well how far do you plan on taking your car with modding?

If you want just a basic 3.4 setup with headers then a vendor PCM is ok , if you want to go beyond that say with rockers/cam/intercooled , then i highly recommend you get your own tuner. Even if you don't wanna go that far ,a tuner is fun to play around with like when you have a shift point setting you don't like you can change it. I've probably changed shift points about 4-5 different times already.

what do shift out art now....any higher than 6300 i should have bigger ratio rockers right?

I recommend keeping it below 6000 unless you've made appropriate airflow mods. I shift at 5600 1-2, 5500 2-3 and 3-4. According to the dyno I'm past my power peak at that point and it falls off at 5800. All the torque is down low, so keep it down low.

You don't need taller rockers, you need stronger springs to rev higher, but IMO these superchargers in stock form lose their efficiency that high.

I have my shifts set at 5600 , 5800 and 5400 . I don't get it up to that high in second often but its probably a bit too high. And without a cam our motors won't do anything over 6k.

What kind of dyno numbers did you put down derek?

209 HP at 5500 RPM, 248 lb ft torque, peak around 3500 but a nice flat torque curve that stays pretty high the whole range. One of these days I'll scan it in...

Also, it was on a Mustang dyno, which usually gives off lower numbers than a DynoJet dyno.

209 to the wheels and 250 torque??

I have to go look at the dyno sheet again, maybe it was 238 not 248. Yeah, these are low end torquey motors, so the torque peak is really low. Are you thinking that's low or high?

Remember that HP is a factor of torque vs RPM, and since my HP peak isn't until 5500 RPM, torque has fallen off a good amount by then.