@Jovian Well worth the $ wasn't it? Would you mind sharing your experience in power delivery from your mountainous joy rides with your M8s - be it on your Stg1 or E30 tune?
This route seems to be the "Road Less Travelled" and so many cannot comprehend what 22fins an Inch will do for a Tube and Fin while fitting in the stock location.
Absolutely well worth the money. I ran the OEM intercooler on the GTI with that 91oct EQT tune for over a year before getting the AMS and had no clue what I was leaving on the table. Heatsoak is real on this engine and it pulls back accordingly to keep things safe. If you have ever had a good pull and then the rest dont seem as exhilarating thats probably the intercooler not keeping up. The graphs I put in my article give some insight into this compounding issue of heat soak with every pull I did.
Like most car mods I thought an upgraded IC would help a bit of performance but would be hard to notice with the butt dyno but thats not the case here. It was very noticeable and the car pulls much more consistently now as the ECU has to hold it back less.
I like the direct replacement intercoolers over FMIC for various reason. Most of the time you need to leave the stock intercoler in when doing a FMIC due to it holding other thing in place. So you keep all that weight and now its just a block of metal getting no flow internally to dissipate heat (unless you are running a twintercooler setup). I think I read GTI Jake working on a setup that removes the stock intercooler and adds a bigger oil cooler or rad to work with his FMIC, that would be better option for FMIC setups.
I think the flow of the tube and fin intercoolers work better with the MK7 sandwich of coolers that they have going on. Putting a super dense intercooler in between all that is only going to restrict flow more. I dont have data on this and its just a theory but I think it makes sense.