Synthetic Oil Brand and Weight for Powerstroke 6.7 HO

Top 3 are Rotella T6 (3rd one was only used for 1,000 miles), bottom 2 are HPL No VII Euro 10W-40. Look at #1 vs #5 at the same mileage.

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At 10,000 miles of service, the HPL sample is showing half the wear metal count of the Rotella when the latter had 7100 miles on it.

That's frankly a staggering difference. It's quite typical that you will never see much more than a couple PPM either direction when switching oils, but for Rotella to come in at about 7-10ppm/k miles of just iron is a pretty underwhelming performance. We've seen lots of oils showing TOTAL wear metals much less than that.

Indeed, the total wear metals count of the HPL sample of 85ppm vs the T6 total of 158 is significant (imo) precisely because UOA typically will not show a huge disparity between oils used in similar engines and duty cycles.

Heck, I'd be so bold as to suggest that Delvac or Premium blue MINERAL oils would outperform the T6 in a comparable 10k OCI when measured by total wear metals on a Polaris report.
 
As I started this thread, I wanted to provide a quick update...

I ended up changing my oil at 1,000 miles to Shell Rotella T6 5W-40. I'm about 4,200 miles now. The oil seems to be doing fine but I still do notice the "typewriter tick" that is quite prevalant on many 6.7L Powerstroke and 6.6L Duramax diesel engines. Since NAPA is currently having a sale on the Valvoline Premium Blue Extreme 5W-40 oil, I went ahead and bought 4 gallons of it and will try that at the 5,000 mile mark. I'm curious to see if it will help eliminate the "typewriter tick". It seems that the Valvoline PBE is a really solid oil with a stout additive package. Even more so than the Rotella T6.
 
That's what I use also: Valvoline Premium Blue 5W40. It's only $25/gallon at my NAPA. Have any members here gotten oil analysis on this oil to prove it's better than Rotella?
 
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