Hey my name is Danielle and I'm new on here. I have recently started driving a 2000 Audi TT and I absolutely love it but I have found oil pooling in my intercooler and intake so I pulled the turbo out and it had a lot of play in it. I have a stock turbo but want something a little better. I don't want to kill my gas mileage or have to reprogram my car because it's mainly highway use. I heard that a K03 and K04 was good. Which one would you all recommend? And who would you recommend I get it from? I have looked at APR, Turbonetics, and Turbocharger Pro's.com. Do you have any advice?

 

Well...the problem with uprading the turbo is that it's a slippery slope as far as parts and none of them are cheap. I was in your situation a couple years ago. I bough a 01 TT 225 and it had a blown turbo too. One thing that we'd need to know is what kind of tt do you have? If you are unsure, a single-outlet exhaust = 180 and a dual-outlet = 225. That's a pretty good rule of thumb. Anyhow, assuming that you have a 180, the k04 turbo is an upgrade to what you have now but to use it you have to buy a new exhaust manifold to fit the turbo (i've heard), probably a new downpipe because of this, maybe even a new turbo inlet pipe setup (again, I'm guessing on all of this I went a different route). If I had to guess, you'd probably have over $500 in parts right there. But the problem at that point is that the 180 (assuming) only runs 8 psi of boost. Upgrading to the k04 and still only running 8psi will be a pretty small boost in power I'd imagine. Not $500+ worth for sure. That's where all this tuning comes in with these $400-1000 tunes, because they are the other half of the equation. They'll up the boost and timing and get your power out of the turbo. So... lowballing it all you'd have $900 minumum going with a bigger turbo (k04... the easy one). Is that enough to make you just wanna buy a rebuild kit for your k03 like this one?

But then from there you're going to have enough power to cut your clutch's life in half. There's another $500 worth of just parts for a clutch that'll hold up. And at this point, my thought was... if I'm going this crazy then why not just ditch the k04 and go bigger? And the answer to that is piston rods. If you make over 300 ft lbs of torque you'll have to upgrade the rods or you will blow a hole in the side of your motor. That's another $500 in just parts. But the labor on that one especially will be outrageous. I don't know much on the prices of labor on wherever you may take it (I did everything myself) but I know that the audi dealership is so expensive it's not even worth considering and other places all seem scared to work on an audi. But you can probably almost double the price on all of this stuff if you're not doing it yourself.

Again... I can't stress enough that this is all a slippery slope. Everyone says that an aftermarket tune is the best bang for the buck even though it's pretty expensive... but honestly it's true. I didn't want to listen to that either. It is possible to tune yourself to an extent with a diode mod and a manual boost controler so you can manually up the boost, but you have to put in a lot of work yourself and know exactly what you're doing and it requires you to log fuel trims and a bunch of stuff and can become a headache and worst of all... if you do it wrong you blow up your car. So if you're not 100% confident in your abilities I would not suggest that.

I'm not trying to be a negative nancy on your build... but the old expression "go big or go home" applies here. If you're going to upgrade the turbo, look to spend a considerable amount of money. At that point it may be worth it... I'm all wheel drive and can spin the tires for the first 3 gears. It's a rocketship. Then off-boost I still get like 35mpg. I love it. But if you're not trying to spend a ton of money I'd just stick with what you have. I'd say I wish I would have done the same but it's too late and "going big" has paid off. I'm not the bandwagon type... but chip it and maybe put in an aftermarket downpipe if you want the best power for the $.