agreed, it's normal. But to answer your question..... I installed an oil pressure gauge about 3 weeks ago. Trying to decide where to tap the oil supply to get an accurate reading on pressure, led me to do a search here on EVOm. Some people recommended to tap a galley that feeds oil to the cam journals. Easy to get to, on the head and therefore on top of the car. Seemed reasonable so that's where I made my tap. My experience from this, once the oil heats up and thins out, oil pressure drops to something just barely over 0 psi at this location. Since the factory manual says anything over 2.4 psi is adequate, I started questioning where does the factory tap for oil pressure? Well it isn't the galley that feeds the cams, that's for sure. So to get to the point, you don't have enough oil pressure at idle to keep the lifters pumped up, hence the ticking noise. If you tick at anything over idle, I'd say you have a problem that isn't normal noise.

As a follow up, I moved my sendor down to the oil filter area, where other threads recommended it, and I have oil pressure well above the 2.4 psi minimum at idle.

 

every evo does, mine does too, and its done it ever since it was a stocker