QUOTE(DanT @ Jan 12 2011, 01:57 AM)
If your car is a street car only...then slotted or vented rotors will get you nothing but a thinner wallet
All my street vehicles have slotted rotors.
I like them, especially in the rain. The water film is wiped off instantly.
I think it also helps keep sand and grit from getting trapped under the pads. In my experience, the slotted rotors develop fewer wear grooves.
That said, I don't know about availability of off-the-shelf slotted rotors for /4 applications, which also contain the bearing carriers (front). Any competent machine shop should be able to do it but there's an art to it (how many? how deep? spaced regularly or nonsymmetrically?) and this is _no_ place to be experimenting. They'll need to be balanced after machining. And there is no getting around the fact that any machining is removing mass of which 914's have no surplus...
Despite my initial reservations, I'm also a convert to cryo-treated rotors.
A full shipset of cryo treated slotted rotors and good pads is expensive and as DanT observes, probably substantial overkill for the average street 914. If it doesn't rain much where you live, you'll probably never notice any benefit.
(Pads and rotors for the Titan was around $1k and I got group-buy pricing on the pads. But the Titan has a reputation for undersized brakes and I felt an upgrade was in order. For the Subie it was about $800.)