I never said it was rubbish, it seems you just like arguments. The front mount IS better overall, again, read what I said. You don't NEED one. It's not a necessity.

All I did was bring some balance to the sweeping all smic are rubbish post.

No need to go Willy waver on it.

Out of curiosity, how do you clean the internals of an intercooler? As I assume using water isn't a good idea? Cos I would guess mine needs doing.

lol love arguments ;-)

as for cleaning i would use petrol or brake cleaner and would fit a catch can at the same time ;-)

i used the ebay side mount and i think it was way better than stock you just have to duct tape the air guide to it to make sure it gets a flow of air holds boost well too , i now run a forge side mount which i got of e38 from a mk4 owner going big turbo so wanted shut was less than 6 months old and was only £190 quid selivered with a new s3 strut brace thrown in awesome bargain and while no massive difference seems to run cooler than the e bay item and bit more free flowing too but both better than stock imho

There is a lot of info on stock vs fmic on vwvortex, also good info on twin sic setups, stock and uprated. The stock smic is a very good design and as it is tube and fin it is quite efficient. Where it suffers is that the air flow is not great, this can be improved with the wheel arch venting (lots of variety on this but the bigger the vent the better) also as mentioned they do get filled up with oil and also crud in the fins as well as oxidation. A twin smic set up all nice and clean with improved air flow can work for stage2+ if you go for uprated twin smic then they can handle 350-400(depending on the quality or course) as there are a lot of US s4's running smic's.

I have a set of s3 smic's to go on just haven't got arround to it yet, the vag group has spent a fortune on developing smic's across their vehicles and they are fitted from 150bhp1.8t's up to the high power Porsches.