Dark Performance divided T4 manifold impressions

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The general construction of the manifold is acceptable at best in my opinion. The materials used in the runners are quite thick, and the welds are generally beefy with good penetration. There was one spot on my manifold though--where the 2/3 runners combined at the collector that there was a weld missing.

The flanges are both very thick, however they were both significantly warped. This is nothing that some time on a belt sander can't fix, but it is still annoying.

A more major problem was that a couple runners were not flat enough, making it impossible to fit the nut onto the exhaust manifold stud. This is still fixable, but my shop had to cut the runner off the flange, beat it down with a hammer, and then re-weld it.

After getting it all together, the manifold sits under an inch away from the bottom of the hood, so I would recommend using some sort of heat shielding for the bottom of the hood to avoid killing the paint. I picked up some stuff sold by Indy Evo off of evolutionm.net, which looks like a killer product.

Performance-wise, I was initially concerned that the merged wastegate passage would be an issue due to contamination between the two scrolls, causing loss of exhaust pulse energy as well as possible issues with backpressure. If you look at these pictures of the positioning for both wastegate ports however, you'll notice that they are fairly out of the way (on the top in the first pic, and on the right in the second):

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Preliminary performance..

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This is on a 63/88mm turbo (Borg Warner S300SX 88/75) in a 1.0 A/R divided T4 turbine housing. Not the smallest turbo, so I was a little worried about spoolup. The pull was on E70 with ~11:1 dropping to 10.7:1 AFR's and about 13 degrees of timing (read: conservative), but I have a map sensor recorded 15 psi by 4500 RPM.

All in all, this is a pretty decent deal with all things considered (cost of a nicer manifold, cost of a second wastegate, etc.) and I would recommend it to someone looking for a divided T4 manifold with an average budget.