3 knock counts = 1 degree of timing pulled by the ecu.
Its a different measurement for the same thing, like cm and inches. You’re not logging how much knock is there but your looking at how the ecu is reacting to how much knock it heard.
So 30 knock counts your pinging so bad the ecu acts by pulling timing 10 degree from the target.
25 counts you pulling timing by 8.3 degrees.
It pulls timing to be safe but you are getting an initial spike in that pull for the ecu to react. So the motor is getting a fair bit of knock for that to happen.
I have my CEL light set to flash on at anything over 2 degree of retard, that’s the same as 6 counts
How are you losing free power, if you have a timing target of 30 degrees advance, and it goes "ping!" and you see 30 counts its retarding timing down 10 degrees and you get 20 degrees advance. That’s what the motor in that case should be running anyway.
Im not trying to have a big tuning debate, but my car when i turned the boost up on an aggressive chip ages ago before i started using ecmlink, i got 20-30 counts of knock, so i turned the boost down to where it wouldn’t knock until i could tune it properly. Rather than drive around with it constantly reacting to the knock it was always getting and hoping that was safe. (especially as the chip had octane reset so it would always end up running the higher octane map rather than interpolate between the high and low in response to all the knock, so it would never learn and keep banging its head off as the timing targets would never get lower.
I didn’t know at the time how the counts related to timing pulled but I wanted to be safe as it was seen as a lot. Later on when I looked at RS maps which the chip ran (the pic of the maps vr401 provided me, thanks) I could see the timing targets on boost were 30-31, and then I was getting 30 counts the timing was going down to ~20-21 degrees so it all makes sense to me later on now actually tuning the car not running an rs map. Im glad I turned the boost down till I had the tools to tune it properly.
Maybe the guys getting a bit of knock there should get one of you chips written up if they want to run more boost?