Am i better off just buying a performance chip and replacing the orignal prom than burning the orignal one?

I would buy a couple blank chips, they are cheaper. Then you would have spares if something goes wrong.

After you spend the big money on the performance chip, and you are not happy.

You will down load the Per chip and find very little changes from a stock chip.

Each engine combination is different and the farther from stock you get the more important retuning the chip becomes.

Invest the time to learn and burn your own. Even if a person has an IDENTICAL setup as yours, the same identical eprom may not be optimum. As well, most "performance eproms" ONLY concentrate on Wide Open Throttle and seldom touch touch the "part throttle" portion of the eprom.

THIS IS THE WRONG WAY TO TUNE and you'll most likely encounter driveabilty issues which can make you grow to hate driving your car.

You should start by tuning the part-throttle portion first ESPECIALLY on a SD car and then tune the WOT portion.

And "off-the-shelf" eproms that you buy at your local car parts store are completely useless. And for the money you'll spend on a GOOD hands-on tuned eprom, will cost darn near as much as all the equipment.

If you TRULY want someone else to tune your eprom, your best bet is to get to know the guys that frequent the "Regional Boards" on TGO and find someone that has all the eprom burning equipment and willing to do a "hands-on" tune. Just be aware, that they will concentrate mostly on your WOT (probably at a dyno) and they won't do much with the part-throttle because the amount of time they would need to spend to do it properly is JUST TOO EXPENSIVE (unless they like working for minimum wage).

The wrong way takes a lot more time because, everytime you change part-throttle portion part of the tune it changes the WOT, so if you have lots and lots of time and don't mind a chance at a lean tune destruction of your engine there is no "wrong way", but why reinvent the wheel.