- Joined
- Apr 28, 2012
- Posts
- 23,910
- Reaction score
- 46,939
- Ram Year
- 2010 Hemi Reg Cab 4x4
- Engine
- Hemi
The best thing for us all is most engines UNTIL recently are extremely forgiving. Now with di turbos, shrinking tolerances and small problem groups like hemi's, things are changing, but generally speaking most engines would never see much difference with super tech versus redline, or conventional versus synthetic. There are a couple exceptions if you are chasing cold performance or an extended interval, then trying oils made for that will help, but there is nothing wrong with cheaper oils especially these days when the API has a small window that forces all oils to be similar in formula.Wal-Mart's SuperTech. Ran it in a select group of fleet vehicles. No issues. We had the same Pentastar failures as the vehicles running national brand oil. No discernable performance difference (sludge, early lifter/rocker failures, leaks). It's cheap, runs 7500 miles like the rest of them. Maybe if you ran your engine 500k plus there would be a small performance edge on HIGH END oil, but in my little test group, 250k was about the normal life expectancy for a service vehicle. By that time it was worn out from being in the service life, idling, and about 9 million start/stop cycles. I've seen some scienced results comparing SuperTech to other national brands. It loses, but by a SMALL margin. Maybe this has been covered already, but I'm not reading the previous 2586 pages of comments to find out
So in my opinion anyone wanting to use super tech do a little research for yourself, so you can justify it to yourself, because surely anyone elses opinion doesn't mean much. What I would do if I was on this strategy, and I am with the other vehicle, is get a group of say 5 cheaper choices and look up the formula's with uoa's and/or voa's like on pqia and find one built best. Look at the entire formula and goodies like moly and boron levels, tbn and viscosity.
I can say I got lost when super tech went with different mileage oils and formulas, I muched preferred when they had one. So havoline synthetic, super tech, Kirkland are all in this ilk, cheap synthetic oils but look pretty similar to most of the most preferred oils such a as m1. There are many others as well, even pyb gets tossed into the mix even though it's group 2, the nice additive packages and low price puts it in this group in my opinion. When I did this work, I ended up with Kirkland 5w30, it is 15 bucks per 5 quart when Costco has it on sale =every other month. It is synthetic oil and if you look at the additives, looks like any top shelf otc oil. Look at the voa here. If there is a knock on super tech, it hasn't had a commitment to a stable formula, it can go from high moly, to no moly one year, to average moly.
