Has anybody used the Holley Commander 950 on a third gen car? I do not want to start burningchips. Is this a better alternative? Is it easier? Or is it better to sell the MiniRam, 58mm TB and the Paxton S/C and put a carb on it? I'm beginning to think I might be money ahead and have a lot less headache switching to a carb. Jimmy

 

Too bad, then, you'll never know what good is.

Any high tech answer is going to take work.
An easy answer is a carb..

 

Is the Holley Comander 950 a better and easier alternative for computer limited (and time) people like myself? Has anybody out there used one? What would bethe strengths and weaknesses as compared to switcing to the 7749 or burnin chips?

 

You might try the DFI board, and do a search there, where it has been covered.

In a nutshell the aftermarket stuff is meant to be universal and simple. If you like close enough, then they can be really good, and they can handle the P+H injectors. And they are really expensive, have one fail at the corner of walk and don't walk on a Sun night, and you'll wait f few days for a replacement, with a gm ecm you can afford to carry a spare.

 

Good call on the spare Grumpy, that never dawned on me!

I will add an ecm and spare chip to my assortment of radiator hoses and fluids in the hatch.

 

Ive used the commander stuff on a few engines. These were roughly 800 hp pumpgas 555 cubic inch engines for different applications. They worked pretty good, but it was never an option to use the gm, so I cant compare both systems on the same application. It seemed like we couldn't get it as close with the commander as it appears to pe possible with oem, but they were better than a carb I felt. Also, in fairness to the commander, I'm not sure oem stuff could get perfect on the above engines.
As far as computer knowledge, you still need to be able to manipulate the variables, no matter if its the oem style, or the commander. The only harder part of the oem style is needing more than 1 program, but it is pretty simple. Grumpy's spare ecm idea also is VERY valid. If the commander failed, you will not find 1 at the local parts/wrecking yard. Given my choice of the 3, I'd pick the factory style, and learn to burn chips, but I kinda like the challenge too.....lol.
Bob

 

Just ordered the FAST system from TCI. I'll let you know how it works.

 

I realize this thread is old, but I have been cruising over old posts to find a solution for converting over my speedo on a 91 GTA, that I have switched to a Holley 950 engine management system.

I just thought I would add a little blurb here that I thought was very relivant. I have been running my 383 stroker with a single plane EFI conversion off of the stock 730 GM ECM that came with my car. The car runs quite well, but it took approximately 40-50 burns. Given I did not use a dyno or track time (those are for WOT anyway). I used a wideband, some common sense, and my preference as to how a car should cruise on the street.

My final deciding factor for switching was the tuning on the fly, the flexibility to run high impedence injectors as well as boost.

As far as ecm failure is concerned I cut my stock harness and added a 40 pin CAT connector. Now I can plug in either ECM.

 

You can do on the fly tuning with a 730.

I wonder how long it would have taken you to get the tune right with the 950 without your 730 experience.

 

Yea I researched getting the Moats hardware and software, as well as implementing the wideband code. The cost would of been a little less, but not much.

I was able to pick up the Holley 950 and its connectors for Wester's garage for 475 plus shipping. It was already set up for wideband and on the fly tuning.

I agree cutting my teeth on DFI using the 730 and the excellent help from this site, makes setting up any DFI much easier.

To tell the truth I had planned on using the 730 or 749 for my own DFI setups as long as they were cheap and available. I changed my mind when my father purchased the H950 to run a four barrel TBI on a 383 supercharged, with a 142 roots blower. It installed effortlessly and was tuned "street friendly" with inside a week. After that I gave it a second look,,, what can I say.

The menus are pretty intuitive. It works with "Windows whatever" pretty well, and it can drive just about any setup you are thinking about running, and you do not have to modify or change the ECM.

Does the H950 have fall backs. Definetly!!

The IAC is pretty slow and stupid. Previous experience will help you work around this. I used tips I garnered from this site (specifically from Grumpy) to calm down IAC fluctuations.

Decel fueling is a little ruff, and at this point I have only been able to band aid it with more fuel and timing, which is less than optimal.

No Check engine light (this is a huge oversight!)
Nothing specified for TCC. I am looking into using one of the aux outputs for this
91/92 Electronic speedos do not work with the H950 (my reason for being here)

 

One thing you bought with the Holley is more reliability than the emulator stuff that is out there for the GM ECMs. Just having the software work properly alone is almost worth it. Here is an example.......I just started using TP 4.0 on win98SE. If you ALDL datalog and record, then stop recording and click on something besides the text box that pops up then it disappears but keeps focus and can not be brought back sometimes.......CTL+ALT+DEL to kill it. Logging session gone bad.

Using the same setup and doing a bin stack has problems also. Do a bin stack and the the entire TP 4.0 goes into a modal dialog box mode to never return.......CTL+ALT+DEL to shutdown the app. Sometimes it creates a new bin.....sometimes not. I did 10 burns were it said "bin created successfully", BUT it didn't. I was making tiny idle changes (big injectors) and nothing was helping (because TP wasn't actually making the changes). I looked back at the dates of the new bin files only to find it didn't make the new bin properly. Restarted the PC and all worked fine with TP. TP 4.0 also changes the system font at random and causes win98se illegal instructions/mem leaks when trying to access a closed file when TP 4.0 once had it open. All very strange.

I went back to using TunerCat and now need to get the tdf editor. I am guessing that the emulator hardware and software will become better with time. TC is very mature compared to them. The GM ECM emulator Hardware and Software stuff is typically hobbyists doing this in their spare time. Holley can devote much more resources so you can't compare the two in that respect. I think the hobbyists are doing a great job at this stuff so far. They are kind of stuck though because they close source thier stuff and then sometimes get offended when bugs pop up. If they followed the Linux model and open sourced it then things would get fixed at a faster rate. But that would mean that the "hobby business" would make as much money for them. But would also make their product better. What is really funny is the "disclaimer" they put on it saying you can't reverse engineer it WHEN they created it by reverse engineering the GM code.

Yes, the SES would be nice on the Holley. Writing test/debug code takes a long time so Holley skimped there.

Both the 730 and the Holley have shortfalls. Check out the NVSRAM module that MonteCarSlow designed. I think it is a great emulator that can/will be much more reliable than the stuff that is out there.