Wondering if the gains from a cam would still be the same with the entire stock exhaust system in place? I understand a larger cam benefits from breathing and exhaling better...just wondering if leaving the stock exhaust in place will choke the gains of the cam.

lol, Ill take that as a no.

You'll see a power increase over stock but not as much as you would with headers. Many early muscle cars had some wild cams in the motors from the factory, and they were running through the stock exhaust.

i believe if you do this, you'll be wasting time and money as you won't get the true potential from your cam if it can't breathe properly. you have got to get the headers installed, otherwise you're wasting money also on tunes as you'll need 2 of them if you do it at different times. you can do the headers and get by w/o a tune but you can't get away with that in doing the cam, that will def. need to be tuned.

If you don't get a tune after installing headers that's wasting money too.

I have no intention of ever touching the exhaust, I was thinking about doing the dod delete and while it was apart replacing the cam kinda as a safety precaution and looking for power upgrades but I was wondering if I'll get the roughly 60whp some cam packages claim without headers.

If you're gonna do a cam at least put some high flow cats on your car, those are the biggest restriction in the stock exhaust.

I was hoping vms would chime in and give me a rough estimate on the gains, like I said I wanted to do the valvetrain for peace of mind and while I'm in there I might as well throw in a bigger cam. If that's gonna be a waste I'd rather just put the bottle on the car and call it a day.

It's hard to explain to everyone because there's a usual plan of attack to modding cars but since this is just my commuter I'd like to keep it as simple/quiet/easy to drive as humanly possible...I've built up 4 cars in the past that became a hassle to drive to work. If the cam isn't gonna be worth it I'd rather just throw the bottle on and call it a day vs doing exhaust and a cam and valvetrain.

Adding high flow cats to the stock exhaust will hardly change the sound. You could even run headers with the stock axleback mufflers and that would be quiet too. The guy that sold me the Borla axlebacks had that same setup. I heard it in person and it's very quiet, even when he got on it.

Talking to my guy, the stock axle backs keep it very quiet. So try that

Problem is quiet is a matter of taste, I honestly am looking to sound deaden the g8 and I think the stock re050s are loud but I've already bought invos to solve that. I do a lot of highway driving trying not to fight exhaust noise while using my phone plus 1500 for an arh or kooks setup just isn't what I want to do right now. The catless setups I've heard so far are kinda raspy.

Long tube headers with the mid pipes/cats and the stock axlebacks will be quiet on the highway. Many guys that had this setup didn't like it because it was too quiet.

2steps, give me a few weeks to get back down south and I will post a video with sound of my car for you.

I went with a cam before headers and went 12.50's thru the manifolds. My cam was a 217/225 Lunati...

I tried finding clips of dt's with stock gt mufflers all I can find is someone with the washer mod and another person with gxp and bot setups are loud.