KEY POINTS TO INTERCOOLER DESIGN
An intercooler is not ground breaking at all, but our core is different and made to a level different than the competition. When we built our core, we made it as big as possible (not going to 4" thick which is a bit too thick in our opinion) and still using the FULL opening in the bumper. 4" Intercoolers do work, but the downfall is the thicker it gets the less effective it gets. Given 2 cores with the same volume, a thinner core that is bigger in all ambient directions is better than a super thick one that is smaller on the ambient side. There is enough room to make ours 4" thick but it does make it a very tight fit between the bumper and AC condenser. So some of our descision had to do with fit.

So if you look at our core you can't really even see welds because we made it as wide as we could (while still fitting between the AC lines and being able to connect to the boost tubes). Wider is better as there is more ambient cooling surface. Because of the high IC inlet temps, a bigger core on the Ambient side is important. The height of our core is also as big as we felt would still be functional. We could have gone taller but its just that much less of the core that gets air flow. So we made it as big as we could.

Our size of core is
PERRIN 20.75" x 12.375" x 3.625" = 930 cu-in Ambient cu-in 256cu-in
Brand-1 18" x 12" x 4" = 864 cu-in Ambient cu-in 216cu-in
Brand-2 20" x 12.4" x 3.625" = 899 cu-in Ambient cu-in 248cu-in

We didn't purposely make it bigger than others, we made it as best we could, which just happens to be a little bigger. Maybe we need to use that on our site......

We found the OEM isn't centered at all, so we fixed that (which is something not everyone has done). Our core is not an off the shelf core, its one we designed, and had built. While that does add cost, it does make ours that much better. Next up is the cast endtanks. These are also more expensive to make but flow better and look way nicer! This is not something people do initially on a new core because of cost. But this is the one thing we feel makes our part stand out from the rest.

There are lot of factors that go into making a proper intercooler, price, fittment, installation ease, size and functionality. We feel we have a very good balance of all these things.