Ok, I'm a newb to this moding my car so that I can be a kickass d00d that wastes you in the 1/4 mile thing, so bare with me if this question seems dumb.
I've been reading a lot on this board over the past few days and I've seen a lot of posts that talk about people chipping their cars, or tweaking their ecu's, and it seems like everybody is pumped about it. But today I was talking with this guy that was telling me that chipping a car just isn't worth it, because you get very little hp gain out of it. Is this true? He said that it's worth it if you have a truck, but not if you have a car. Is their any validity to this?
Also, if you respond to this post please speak in lamans terms so that I can understand. I'm newb, remember?
btw, my car is an auto 4-cylinder '02 accord
No mods on it yet but I will be sticking on a cold air intake and a better muffler.

 

certain cars yes it works, on a stock honda or one with basic performance mods no.

it mainly works on trucks cause they have rev limiters and aren't tuned for performance. it also works on turbo cars, by increasing boost.

so if you see a $20 fake mugen chip on ebay, don't buy it.

 

These sort of ecu adjustments are only considerabley good if you have at least i/h/e.. Go To http://www.hondata.com for more info..

 

considering Honda tunes their cars for LEV & ULEV performance (and still does a good job of balancing power vs. emissions output) you CAN pull quite a bit out of a 'stock' car with a solid base tune.

so to answer the question is a ebay chip or the like a waste? yes. is a good dyno tune a waste? no.

 

No, I'm not about to get a chip off of eBay. My mom didn't raise a fool-boy.
I'm still trying to come to terms with what exactly a dyno tune is. I've read about it here and there, but as for the whole shibang I don't quite have it down. I have checked out hondata's website and seen what they have there, but it's extremely expensive. One of the threads in this group has a guy or two selling p28 chips which seem to be quite popular, but now that I think about it the p28 chip isn't everything that you can get form hondata, is it? I'm confusing myself.

 

P28 is a model of Honda ECU found in the 92-95 Civic EX/Si. This is the ECU that I do my development on... without getting too deep into specifics its just a very versatile ecu. Its brothers/sisters are the p06/72/75/some 07's/and the list goes on and on.

http://home.insightbb.com/~niedejb/

check out his section on Dyno Resulte when he was NA. While he didnt adjust anything in the ECU you can see he played with many things (fuel pressure, cam timing etc) to achieve the desired tune. an ecu dyno tune is about the same except you're also maximizing things like VTEC x-over and your base fuel & timing maps too.

the accord & prelude use pretty funky ecu's so as a general rule its going to be HARD to find someone to work on that ECU.

hope its a little clearer now!