What pistons out of curiosity?

 

Manley.

Id have to look up the exact model but they're .020 over Manley pistons

 

What do you have for cranking compression?

 

Pretty good. My pistons are 9:1 ratio and my compression test was 165-175 across the board

 

Did you fix the problem? i am having the same issue with my mivec 2.4l. I have both cam gears half a tooth advance (rotate clockwise).

 

2.4L's are noisy. Your tuner should know this. I had to turn down the sensitivity of my knock sensor due to the 2.4L being louder then a baby in church.

 

To be honest, with stock turbo and 2.4L, I don't even believe that you'll make more power up top running 27 psi instead of 23-24psi. It will just create significantly more heat without much more, if any more airflow.

Retarding your intake, thereby reducing overlap on small turbos will help gain some top end, all else being equal, because with the backpressure being larger than the intake manifold pressure (aka boost), on overlap period the exhaust gas will actually be pushing back into the intake. Generally, retarding intake will lose you some spoolup and maybe midrange, but with the turbo being so small relative to the motor displacement, it's not going to be much.

With a 4G64 and built engine, there's a lot of factors that changes your ideal knock sensitivity, such as piston clearance, bearing clearance, rod ratio, whether or not you're running balancer shafts, etc. The best way to calibrate your knock sensitivity will be to use a separate wideband knock sensor, an amplifier and headphones.