So my car is bone stock, which means I only get 150HP from my 5.0 apparently. Would a tuning chip make a noticeable difference in power or fuel economy? I'm looking at the SCT Eliminator, such as http://www.blueovalchips.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=2, but perhaps for $350 there's mechanical upgrades I should think about.
That chip won't do anything for your car unfortunately. Take your $350 and save it for heads/intake/cam/gear swap. The SCT chip is meant for people who have modified their car from stock. It won't gain any power on a stock engine.
Totally agree with the above post.
Travis
I would say that an SCT chip would not make any power gains that would be worth the $500 for the chip and a dyno session to tune it on a stock Fox car. They make much better gains on the OBD-II cars especially on the SVT cars (4-valve and supercharged 4.6L), 3-valve 4.6L, and the 5.0L Coyote motor cars. This is what everyone sees are the big gains on those cars and think it applies to all cars across the board.
Spend your $500 on an exhaust for the car and that will be the building block for the H-C-I swap mentioned above. Without the exhaust you will not see the full hp gains from the H-C-I swap. I would also say that if you are going to go that far you might as well so the mass air switch so that the car can adaptively learn. From there you could chip the EEC and see some benefit.
Darren