I was just wondering your thoughts on upgrading an exhaust without upgrading the air intake or headers. I've heard from a friend that it's not a good idea to upgrade the exhaust without doing the headers and that it is pretty much useless to upgrade the exhaust without doing the air intake. Also, I have heard that if you upgraded the air intake without upgrading the exhaust that it could damage your engine because the extra flow of air would not be able to escape fast enough. What are your thoughts on this?

 

Upgrading the exhaust is mostly about sound these days. Sure, the stock muffler on these trucks is ginormous, but it does have 3" tubing that flows pretty good. Stock cats are high flow as well. The most restrictive part of the Ram's exhaust is the crushed Y-pipe that some guys cut out and have a Magnaflow mini-y welded in.
Do what I did and still have.....Magnaflow catback or anyone you like the sound of(beware that chambered muffflers usually restrict flow such as flowmaster)
so, change out your catback or be super cheap and swap out just the muffler and buy a drop-in K&N airfilter.
You don't need headers or a CAI fo your truck to run properly. You can swap out your muffler an nothing else. You can swap out your airfilter and nothing else. You can install headers and nothing else, BUT, a combination of those 3 would be more beneficial than any one item alone but we're talking very little difference...like something the butt dyno wouldn't notice.

 

^^^ Agreed.

 

i found that a full air intake (removing resonator) gives you way more sound then any exhaust at least up front.... but i did my exhaust as well... I just dropped a dynomax muffer with a downturn underneath my truck.... pleanty for me its all what you want.... eventually i did headers which gave a real nice sound.... but i still cant hear shi* over my CAI

 

I did the exhaust first on mine, went all out with an expensive catback. It was nice, sounded good, then I did a cai and it made it sound much better and changed the note of the exhaust. Then got rid of the catback and went to just a muffler and like it even better. There really is no roght or wrong order to do things, just know that the intake and exhaust will work better together than they will apart.

 

Thanks for all of the great input. I am mostly looking for performance, but also a nice low gutteral sound would be great too. I have seen and heard the Aero Turbine and it seems pretty good. So, if this is correct, the stock exhaust tubes are plenty wide enough for the addition of a cold air intake and I can just switch out the muffler and/or resonator to get the performance and sound that I am looking for?

 

You are correct, the stock piping is 3" leading into the muffler and will be fine to run a better muffler, no need to spend a lot of $$$ unless you want it for looks, remove the resonators and enjoy. The real issue with the stock piping that catbacks dont fix is the stock Y pipe as it is crimped horribly bad. They took 2 pipes and sandwiched them togethere. You can pick up a new Y pipe for fairly cheap from magnaflow and have it welded in when you do the muffler. Then add a CAI later on if you dont want to do it now, or do it at the same time since you will only need to pay for the muffler and not a full catback.