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is ball bearing upgrade for Drag gen3 worth it?

1433 Views 12 Replies 7 Participants Last post by  FastNSX
the dealer told me that the $500 upgrade is not worth it. he said there is little notiseable different. i want to hear it from you guys who have turbo on there cars. should i use the money to get apex AVC-R instead. i'm planning to get lighten flywheel down the road. how bad is turbo from gen3 kit on b16 anyway?
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i dont think you'll need it. a little lag isnt that bad. i've got a super 60 in my car now. full spool by 4300, no bb.
hmm, i thought ball bearing make the turbo last longer do to less frictions. i'm new with turbo stuff and dont know much about turbo.
I have never seena ball bearing turbo last longer than a year on a daily driven car. very very sensitive to any contaminants that wrk their way into oil w/ normal driving.
better off gettin a turbo thats non bearing.
what about ceramic bearings. are they any good?
you dont need the ball bearing turbo....especially for $500.
Ball Bearing Turbos are only good for Bigger turbo's like T4 and bigger... if you plan on getting a t3/t4 or smaller then its not necessary... good luck..
doesn't the Apex-i kit and the Greddy kit comes with smaller turbo with ball bearings?
Yes they do but that is only to make the turbo spool up so fast since you cant get that much power from it they try to introduce the idea of a turbo with a significant turbo lag which theorytically is not 100% possible b/c there is always lag but what the hell with a turbo that small and ball bearing options you cant tell there is lag... it is really usefull for bigger turbos though..
I have a ceramic ball bearing turbo that has lasted for years of daily driving.

However, I think the ball bearing upgrade is one of those marginal things that is only worth it if you have done everything else and are just looking for that little extra bit of performance.
does ceramic bearings help turbo to spool up faster or is it just a reliability factor.
It just helps it spool faster. Most of the studies done on turbo reliability on commercial trucks show no difference in reliability between bb turbos and non bb turbos. And, those guys put 100K+ miles per year on those things. The first major scheduled maintainance on a semi is at one million miles.
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