Hey everybody, I'm Justin with AmericanMuscle.com, and this is my detailed review, dyno test
and drive of the SCT preloaded performance tunes on the SCT X4/SF4 Power Flash tuning
device, available for your 2015 and up five liter F150.
The preloaded SCT X4 is going to be for the F150 owners out there looking to go with one
of the most trusted names in the aftermarket tuning category and one that's going to get
you some more all around performance out of your F150.
Now you should also be considering this device here if you're looking for one of the most
affordable devices in the category, along with one that's going to be very user-friendly
and offers some pretty cool bells and whistles.
Now in this video, guys, I'm going to walk you through the power improvements, overstock,
the difference in fuel economy and the difference in drivability of our SCT Tune five liter
truck, so hang out with me for a little bit because I'll walk you through the device,
we're even going to hop in and go for a spin later on.
But first, let's talk about what kind of power numbers you can expect with your own rig.
Before we meet any pools on our Dynojet, we'll replace the big heavy aftermarket 35s in the
rear of our truck with the factory wheel entire setup, just for the most accurate results
on our dyno.
We then proceeded to get our baseline numbers out of the way.
After that, we uploaded our 87 octane SCT performance tune, and ran the truck one more
time.
Finally, we drained all that 87 octane, filled it with 93 octane, reran the truck with the
corresponding 93 octane performance tune from SCT, and here are all those results.
Baseline run using our 2015 5 liter F150 on 87 octane gave us 278 horsepower and 316 pound
feet of torque at the rear wheels.
With the 87 octane performance tune from SCT uploaded, the truck is now making 280 horsepower,
325 pound feet of torque.
With the 93 octane performance tune from SCT, the truck made 290 horsepower, 339 pound feet
of torque.
So with the 87 octane tune in the truck, only picked up a peak gain of 3 horsepower, and
9 pound feet of torque, with curve gains of 12 horsepower and 13 pound feet of torque
respectively.
On 93 octane, the truck did much better, picking up peak gains of 12 horsepower, 23 pound feet
of torque over the baseline numbers, and gains of 23 horsepower and 25 pound feet of torque
under the curve.
Now full disclosure, guys, I spent the last week or two driving our five liter F150 with
a number of different tunes and devices just to monitor things like power improvement,
fuel economy and of course drivability.
Now my drive consists of a nice, healthy mix of highway and back roads, and with the factory
calibration I was averaging roughly 11 to 12 miles per gallon with our 6 inch lifed
F150 and those 35s.
With the 93 octane performance tune from SCT, I was seeing 13 to 13 and a half miles per
gallon, again taking the same route and with a rather heavy foot.
One thing to point out here, guys, with other tuning options on this site, you are going
to be receiving separate tunes for both towing and fuel efficiency, along with some kind
of performance tune.
Now, the SCT X4 preloads, you're really only receiving a performance tune, which is going
to be good for stock to lightly modified F150s.
Modifications such as your cold air intakes, exhaust, things like that.
Now on the flip side, guys, if you do want a little bit more power or you want thosefuel
economy or towing specific tunes, you can check out some of our more custom tuning options
available here at AmericanMuscle.com.
On that same topic, if you're perfectly happy with those preloads for now, but you plan
on adding some more modifications down the road, the SCT X4 and the SCT Livewire are
the only two devices currently on the site that will be able to carry those custom tunes
for you.
So, we are going to touch on the drivability of the preloaded X4 tunes here in a minute,
but first, let's quickly touch on price.
The preloaded X4 is going to be one of your most affordable options here on the site when
it comes to tuning your truck, coming in just south of that $400 price point.
Only the Edge HT2 and the Super Chips F5 are going to be slightly more affordable.
But honestly, guys, for the money, the X4 is going to be the most capable and most user
friendly to device, while also being able to give you those custom tuning options down
the road.
Now guys, we can talk about this thing all day, but what do you say we hop in the truck,
we'll go for a spin and we'll talk a little bit more about the drivability.
Alright, guys, so we're out on the road in our 2015 5 liter F150.
We have the SCT 93 octane performance tune up loaded in the truck.
And again, just want to give you some of my basic impressions driving this thing around
for the last week, and just basically how the truck feels now compared to how it did
before in stock form.
SCT went and just turned it up a notch, pretty much across the board.
Everything is just a little bit more increased or a little better, I guess you could say.
Power, again, not going to totally blow your socks off here, but you can tell the truck
is a little stronger, especially down low.
The shifts are a little firmer overall.
Again, definitely not the firmest shifts I've felt out of all the tunes I've tested, but
again, you can play with that a little bit as well.
But overall, it really is just a nice well rounded experience with the SCT preloads.
Again, the 87 octane, you're really not going to see a whole lot of a difference with that.
Yes, you will see some of the transmission settings be improved slightly, the shifts
are a little firmer, things like that.
It doesn't do anything it shouldn't do.
It's definitely not stalling.
There's no surging issues anywhere.
It idles rock solid.
It drives like a stock truck, again, just turned up a notch or two.
That's the best way I can describe it.
I wish it shifted with a little bit more throttle input.
One thing I did notice is you really got to lean into it to get it to downshift, and that's
something I know a lot of you guys at home watching this probably want to fix.
I will say that another tune option that I tested, the throttle input and the sensitivity
was a lot better.
Basically, you got the truck to downshift a lot easier, so you're always in the power
bend.
With the SCT I did notice you really do have to lean on it if you want this thing to boogie.
But once you get into it, it definitely hauls the mail and for being a big truck lifted
with 35, it definitely moves along pretty good.
The miles per gallon, again, not too bad considering we are lifted 6 inches, we are hauling around
some heavy 35s on this thing.
Just a great driving experience.
So, if you have a daily driver, you just want to turn it up a little bit, you don't want
to get too crazy, you might throw on a cold air intake, or an exhaust down the road, the
SCT preloads are a great way to go.
You really won't be disappointed with them.
And if you do want to go with a custom tune down the road, you can do that with the SCT
device, so it is giving you the best of both options there.
So that's my driving impressions of the SCT preloads.
So let's head back into the shop, and I'll walk you through the SCT X4 tuner itself.
And I think you'll find the SCT is going to be one of your most popular devices in the
tuning aftermarket.
The X4 is definitely one of the most user friendly devices, at least in my experience,
and we're going to walk you through it right now.
We'll start with the gauges and data logging.
Now I think this is going to be probably the most popular feature with the X4.
It's something a lot of you guys are going to use the most I think, when having this
thing in your rig.
You're starting off with two pieces of data here, now you have your intake air temperature
and your control module voltage.
Now this is only one of many layouts with the X4, we'll get into a little bit here.
We can actually go ahead and select our gauge layout.
Now you have a number of different layouts to choose from with the X4.
So two is what they start you off with, but you can go all the way down to eight here
at one time to be displayed on the screen.
We'll rundown through some of them right now.
Of course, starting with boost if you had an EcoBoost, that would probably be a very
useful one.
Voltage, coolant temp, intake air temperature, fuel trims, things like that, we have all
kinds of stuff.
Your air fuel ratio, which is a big one with the SCT.
A ton of different stuff to choose from with the X4 and have it all be displayed here for
you.
So, you can go through the menu, you can actually choose a horizontal or landscape mode and
have it be displayed sideways if you prefer.
Personally, I like using it in the vertical mode, and I found that you can buy the suction
cup mound if you want, but I actually have a holder for my iPhone, works perfectly in
there.
Not a bad idea for you guys.
Now if you want to actually data log this stuff, if you're, like I said, making a wide
open throttle pull, if you want to review some data logs, see what the truck is doing,
very, very easy to do.
You're going to want to set up all the stuff you want to data log and when it comes time
to record it, all you do is simply hit that middle button there, you can see the record
button flashes up, you let it go as long as you want and you can basically stop at any
point hitting the center button again.
And this is something that you probably want to offload onto your computer to be reviewed
by your tuner, by yourself if you're into that sort of thing.
So we'll go down one to your vehicle functions.
This is your diagnostic tool with the X4.
This is going to be where you read and clear diagnostic trouble codes or your check engine
lights, better known as we have no codes currently.
But if you did, it would display the code and it's identifier basically, starting with
a "P" or something like that, and it would actually expand upon what it is.
So if you had a misfire code, something like that, it would tell you on here.
And you can actually clear the codes too, if you wanted.
Go down one, clearing your codes, all of our codes are cleared, so there you go.
Go down one more.
This is your special vehicle functions.
You can do a cam reset, which is your keep alive memory, basically stored in the ECU.
Basically, this gets cleared every time you disconnect your battery anyway or your crank
relearn if you happen to have a misfire code, something like that, you'd get into that.
So, again, very useful things to have here on the X4.
Go down to vehicle info, you can view your VIN here, your strategy code, which is what
you're going to need to look at once in awhile when communicating with your tuner, ECU, all
that good stuff there.
Now a nice thing about the X4, this thing has built-in wireless, so if you do need to
update your firmware, which is something you need to do with tuners frequently, they oftentimes
send out updates.
You don't need to plug this thing in to update it.
It's wireless, so as long as it hooks up into your WiFi, the X4 will download the necessary
firmware updates for you automatically and it's a very useful feature to have.
Here's the display orientation I talked about.
We can change to landscape if you want.
So now, there you see.
You can turn it sideways and you can do more of a landscape setting if that's what you're
into.
We'll change that back to portrait real quick.
Light sensor.
Again, this is your light sensor.
You can actually see it right here.
It's built in, so it'll just dim it.
If you like automatically, we have that set up already on ours, so it detects automatically
when it's dark out, dims it for you, it's pretty nice.
Power management mode, that's a way it won't kill your battery.
Basically, you can leave this thing plugged in at all times.
You leave it on auto here, it'll basically be powered down after being inactive for a
few minutes.
If you leave it always on, it's going to drain your battery, so just leave it on auto and
you should be good to go there.
This is pretty cool as well.
Start up, you can either have it start up every time you plug it in or turn your truck
on, it'll default to the main menu.
Or what I do when I had the X4 in my truck, I have it start automatically to the gauges,
because that's where you usually end up anyway.
So that's pretty cool, they give you that option.
And then your factory reset.
This is just going to reset the gauges.
The X4 can do custom tunes for you if you eventually want to go down that road.
As you can see, there's no custom tunes found on the device right now, and that's perfectly
normal, because we do have the preloads in here.
So we're going to select the five liter F150 of course.
You're looking at an 87, 91 and 93 octane preload.
These are all the performance tunes.
You can switch easily.
For instance, if you want to do a 93 octane tune, there you go, we're in 93.
Speed limiter.
Again, pretty cool here.
You can basically set your speed limiter to whatever you like.
We have rev limiters here while driving, 6250 is what we're looking at now.
Again, if you wanted to keep more of a nanny feature on this thing, you can keep the rev
limiter down.
Again, rev limiter in neutral as well, so you're not revving this thing to the moon
while in neutral.
Idle speed neutral, set at 600RPMs.
So these are all the, basically, the different features you can adjust before you actually
upload the tune.
We'll go back to 87 octane here, but this is the stuff you can change.
Now yes, this is a preloaded tune.
You can have some flexibility with it.
You do have the ability to play with it a little bit.
So this is what your basic options are when it comes to that.
So if everything looks good, you're going to approve that.
And then your special operations are unavailable, you hit continue, and then at that point,
you're uploading your tune.
Now when it comes to uploading your tune, guys, a basic one out of three install here.
As you can see, we just plug it into the dash or underneath the dash.
It's going to take 15 minutes or so, give or take, to flash the truck for the first
time.
Plug it in, navigate through a few menus and you're good to go.
The truck's been flashed.
So, the easiest thing you'll ever do to your truck, you're not going to get your hands
dirty.
So that's going to wrap up my review of the SCT preloads on the X4 tuner device.
Be sure to learn more about the device and the tunes right here at AmericanMuscle.com