I didn't go that direction... already have a guage on my dash... I'm going fuel pressure/ Nitrous pressure / and Wideband O2 in my a pillar.

 

Not necessarily. It all depends on the internal desity of the core. If you're running an extruded tube then most likely you wont even notice the difference. The job of an intercooler is to exchange heat out of the air passing through the inside of it. The longer that air is exposed to the cooling fin, the more heat will be extracted. More density = more cooling. Unfortunately the more dense the intercooler is, the slower the air moves through it when the duty cycle is higher. The way to counter this is to add more tubes so the individual duty cycle of each tube is lowered. Intercooling is a science that a lot of people don't really pay attention to. It all depends on what you want to do.

As far as intercooling an N/A motor - a total waste of time. An intercooler's purpose is to bring the air passing through the inside as close to ambient temperature as possible. Unless you have some type of cooling agent like water, n2o, alcohol spraying on the intercooler - it's only going to be able to cool the air to ambient temperature. You might as well just put a cold air intake and be done with it.

 

Ok we may or may not be on the same page here. Boiling water does have a constant temperature yes BUT only if the steam has some where to go. In a pressurized system it is possible to heat water past the point of boiling without it turning to steam. Ok maybe this is getting a little deep here, I thoroughly understand the purpose of a water-to-air intercooler in the case of turbo charging but um, hmmm, ok I think the initial mention of using water at 100 degrees Celsius to cool an intake charge just totally screwed me up.

 

My words sometimes don't come out right but I was really referring to the internal volume of the intercooler itself. If the internal volume of the intercooler is too great for the amount of boost then the turbo lag will be tremendous, agreed? So in other words if the internal volume is great enough then it would be possible to run out of RPM's before the engine ever sees maximum boost hence negating the very result a person would hope to gain.

 

I know my new Scion isnt my old DSM, but old habits die hard. I didnt trust my water temp on my DSM at all, I "feel" better knowing my water temp is 100% accurate. The tolerance for the needle on the stock gauge to move up a little is very high. I know this because I forgot to fully tighten a radiator hose and strated to leak coolant from the pipe (after installing the gauge probe) and my temps were sky high on the piller gauge but the needle on the dash didnt even move one bit until it got to be VERY VERY high, I mean the autometer was reading 300+ after the needle moved on the stocker. I dont trust factory gauges from past experiences.

 

My DSM is the same way, water temp, and oil pressure are beat. The gauge cluster in those cars are just dummy gauges. But I will get gauges for the tC after my warrenty is up, because then I will care a whole lot more...

 

For the most part, we're on the same page. Intake charge will probably never go up to the boiling point of water so who cares, eh? I just wanted to say that the air-water intercooler will actually help a little (possibly) as opposed to an air-air intercooler which, as mentioned, is an odd notion at best.

 

alright this is out of hand and the question has been answered by original post