christ, this is turning into a piss poor argument. You guys are missing the point. The original argument was a comparison between the two intakes. AEM or generic. A pipe is definitely not just a pipe. Granted there are companies that have edited their dynos to make their shit look better. That also is not the point of the argument. The point is that superior engineering yields superior results. If the aem puts out 5 bhp and the generic intake puts out 4, Thats a 25 percent boost and thtas the kind of number that engineers love to see. Granted it may not be worth the money for the difference in some cases, but in some cases it most definitely is. I havent seen any 3rd party dynos for the V2 but ive read about the principle that goes into its design and i believe a competent engineering team could leverage that principle to create significant results. This argument will be beaten into the ground forever, and the coating on the pipe may not make much difference, nor will whether you get it off ebay or from AEM (the shapes of these pipes are very similar anyway), but to say a pipe is just a pipe is an uneducated and ignorant statement. Bernoulli and Hemholtz were a lot smarter than most of us and a team of engineers who knows what they knew is a lot more competent in the subject than a few people who own hondas with boltons and nice wheels.

A lot of people on this board know a lot about how cars work but how many of you have been to a design lab and know about the math that goes into their testing? I have. Lets take a concrete example.

At Pratt and Whitney, a leading producer of aircraft engines, they use computers to simulate the behavior and performance of their engines by changing the degree the fan blades are at in the turbine. There are approximately 32-40 fins per engine. With each blade being able to move approximately 7 degrees one degree at a time, this yields more than 10^12 different blade combinations. With the current power of computers, it would take them more than 60 years to test all of those combinations. Using some statistical analysis, they are able to sample these combinations such that they are 99% sure they can get one of the top 5% of combinations by testing 3 or 4 thousand, but they can never be entirely sure they've gotten the best one.

The same principle applies when testing equipment on any engine, there are too many variables to be sure you've gotten the most performance out of it that you possibly can. Personally, I am willing to bet that despite AEMs dyno inflation, they have put more engineering time on their product than the average ebayer, and I'll take superior engineering every time.