[DGthe3]

Well, high rpm power is great if you plan on keeping your revs high ... but its nearly useless if you don't. Some people like it because it feels like the car 'comes alive' beyond say 6000 rpms. But its more accurate to say that the engine is simply dead before that point. But with a torquey engine, hit the gas at any speed and you don't have to wait for the car to 'wake up' its raring to go already. A side effect of all this is that if you've got a high reving engine, you can't really use its power all that much. But you can use torque all the time.

Hypothetically, lets say you've got a ~4.5L V8 engine that makes 450 hp @7500 rpm (perhaps from a Ferrari) and compare it against the LS3, which is 426 hp @5900. Now, the high rpm engine might make more absolute power. But if you overlay a pair of dyno charts from each, you'd see that the big torquey LS3 makes more power through out its entire rev range. And it won't be just a little more, its perhaps 20% more. For example, if you were to punch the gas at 3000 rpm. The LS3 would give you around 205 hp in return. Meanwhile, our other little screamer would only yield say 170 hp at that speed. To match the power of the LS3 it would need a few hundred more revs. This sort of thing continues until the LS3 hits its redline. Now, some of it can be corrected with different gearing, then again ... if you can gear one car aggressively, you can gear another aggressively. However ... nvm ... I think I've already gone and made this too technical already.