allright, so i have everything in my sig, already on my car, and im trying to figure out where to go now. and id love your opinion.

besides an aggressive alignment my handling is pretty much sorted out nice an neutral, has room to grow but its more than enough for now.

the next big power mods are ecu. water/meth, built engine and big turbo.
i put down 185 on revos dynodynamics dyno that reads about 18-20% low compared to everyone elses (puts me about 220 on a normal dyno), and without building the engine im affraid of passing 260-275whp

and it seems any of the mods can come first or last but untill they are all together i cant get the gain out of any single one of them.
I can get the ecu for now and get the stock turbo tuned and running but it seems like a waste of the 500 bucks to dyno tune.
I can get the turbo first, and run it at low boost and same hp as i have now
and i can spend the money on building the engine,
which im debating a 2.0 stroker and stock head,which will give me better spool and torque but kill my top end. or i can get the forged pistons and eagle rods+ P&P the head and get a set of cams. for about the same price im leaning toward the latter but either way i have a near bulletproof base.

the only cheap next step i can do is water meth to richen me up a bit and maybe squeeze a few more hp out of the setup now. it just seems like a sketchy bandaid solution....

the other option im debating is a gtx3071r (billet turbine that spools almost as fast as the 2860) its a bit more expensive than the kit with the 2860 by about 500 bucks but the 3071 in base trim supposedly spools about like the stock turbo did when it had the stock downpipe (damn crappy oem turbo) so im thinking the GTX3071r with its billet wheel should be damn close to my current spool maybe 500rpm later
or possibly even going cheap and getting a BNR 16g upgrade, though i think id be better off with the garret because of spool and BB design. id like to aim for about 300hp at the wheels for now, but id also like room to grow if i ever decide its not enough.

also, i have the 2.5" magnaflow dp back exhaust, the sound is awesome especially under boost, a few people that have heard it under load say it sounds like a pissed off evo or sti with equal length headers. but i think its begining to hinder me a bit, i ran open dp for a couple days and my spoolup was noticeably faster. being its 2.5 and the muffler isnt a straight through do ya suggest that i replace that first?

I would build the engine first, since it's something you're going to need to safely run more power from any of the other bits. It sucks cause it costs a grip and you probably won't see any real gains from it, but then it's out of the way and you can do the other stuff without worrying about putting a hole in the block before you get a chance to build it. Just my opinion.

Although yea if you think your exhaust is a restriction, you could replace it first and have some gains right away. If you don't think it would hurt your spool, you could go to 3" all the way back, which you'll probably want with a GT30 eventually anyway.

I would do the better flowing exhaust now. And remember it's always easier and cheaper to rebuild a currently running motor than a blown motor. Blown motors tend to send shrapnel around damaging many components including the block, but if you rebuild a running motor you can replace just the rotating assembly.

Then with the motor built you can safely max your current setup while you work towards the GTX turbo kit. I highly recommend a billet compressor turbocharger if you can afford one. They offer only benefits such as quicker spool, decreased discharge air temperature, and a compressor map completely shifted to the right so you get more airflow off the same size inducer and exducer. Win/win/win. Only drawback is the cost.

I don't know what kind of EM solutions are available for the MSM, but I would probably pickup some sort of engine management first. I understand what you're saying about not wanting to waste $500 on dyno tuning, but from your sig it looks like your car has a wideband already, and if I'm not mistaken, those cars come with knock sensors, so I'm assuming whatever EM solution you pickup should be able to read/log data from your knock sensor, and I'm assuming have some sort of knock correction algorithm.

What I'm getting at here is that if you have a wideband, knock sensor and user tunable EM device, there's no reason you can't road tune your car for free. Sure, you wouldn't be able to see gains being made per se, but if your car is MAF based like I think it is, you can merely log & compare MAF G/S as that typically translates into torque (moving more air=more torque, although it is diminished via IAT's as you continue to increase boost). Either way, on pretty much every boosted car I've ever owned, EM has always been the first thing I've addressed, so I'm likely to be a little biased.