im thinkin about buying one soon and i keep getting mixed reviews on them. what is the general opinion of the MSD optis?i have a gm one in there now thats less than a year old and i think it has something to do with my high rpm, high load miss. iv replaced everything else.

i hear some saying they are crap, others say they are as good as the gm one, others say they are better. so whats going on?

 

they are a better unit in my opinion i love mine but you pay for it

 

i love mine never had a problem with it

 

i never had problem with any opti unless i got it soaking wet. i only replaced my 140k mile unit because it would be going into a new motor with all new components so i sprang for the MSD. it lookes awesome and works just as well as the stock declo unit. the MSD is also supposed to withstand longer periods of high RPM usage better than the stock ones because it has bearings instead of a bushing. how true that is i am not sure but dont expect any performance gains outside of its durability. also the harness is built in on mine (vented version) so i no longer have to screw around with that stupid plug right behind the water pump because it extends out to the intake.

 

The msd opti looks like a better design on paper, but has yet to be proven more reliable an the oem. Im not saying it's bad, just stating facts. Go vented if your pre 95, loctite the rotor screws and rtv the cap and both should work fine.

 

It will be nice because all of the MSD opti's are vented, and you won't have to change all your stuff to 95+ to finally have a vented opti. I ran mine for about 45k miles, never had a problem, and I didn't loctite my rotor screws. I was running it on a stock cam motor so it never saw over around 5600 rpm though. Going to use it again when I stick the motor in my truck.

 

MSD's are adjustable so if you are doing forced induction, that's what you want. If you have an N/A engine, just get a GM replacement one. The MSD's only have a bigger price tag and are not worth the extra $200 and aren't proven to be better in any way...they look cool...but ya can't really see em anyway...

for a mildly modified motor, I wouldn't think twice about just buying a stock replacement.

 

How does that help for forced induction?

 

Honestly, I couldn't tell ya...I know i've just heard that from a few shops...it was either beneficial for forced induction or nitrous setups...i can't remember which now that I think about it...sorry, my bad

 

it allows you to manually adjust the timing like a regular distributor. So you can retard the timing for nitrous.

 

That's what I was thinking, my bad guys.

 

the adjustable timing feature shouldnt be used for that. its to correct timing if you used an offset bushing to degree the cam.

 

^Thats what I thought too. Adjusting timing for forced induction needs to be done thru the pcm via tuning software, not the msd opti.

 

I'd check plugs, wires, and coil before you throw an opti at it

 

already changed to msd coil, otvc msd wires and tr55s. nothing changed

 

Im happy with my MSD Opti. Only about 1000 miles on it but no problems so far....BIG price tag tho