Just wondered if anyone can speak from experience on the MCX350 engine - is this enough motor for this size of boat.

I hope you are at sea level.

Are you at a high altitude? I personally think it is underpowered a little but that depends on how you plan on using the boat. If you load it with much weight and people you are probably going to have to reprop it pretty extremely. You will lose top end and burn a ton of fuel. If you plan on just using stock ballast and using it more as a family boat it is probably just fine.

As Brett said, it all depends on how you are going to use it. This is what I ride behind with stock ballast. I have seen people barefoot behind it and even back barefoot. The top speed is 40ish on great water. The only down fall of this boat is that the wake is extremely wide and very soft with stock ballast.

I frequently ride behind my buddies X45 with MCX 350. It does not seem that bad, even with 16 people it was not much worse than my smaller boat with the PCM 330 or my other buddies Malibu with the 340 Monsoon. He runs the Acme 14.25x14.5 prop on the X45 and drives it fairly hard. I have seen him pin the throttle for the 15 minute drive to our riding spot. His first motor threw a rod through the pan at 500 hours. He has about 300 hours on the second motor.

Carson, from Mike's post you can see that the engine will get the job done but if you are hard on it you are going to shorten the life of the engine. The X45 is a massive and heavy boat. It weighs 5k before you even put gas, gear, ballast or people in it. The gas tank is 90 gallons and the boat holds18 people. That is a ton of weight to push around.

I disagree with Jason's assessment of the wake, but that does not relate directly to the OP's question. Jason just needed to go a little faster, weight the boat differently and change the rope length...all factors that are very important, but are very easily fixable. <BR> <BR>My 45 has the 8.1, but I have been in an X35 with the 350 MCX which weighs the same. It performed well, but I would not expect to heavily weight the boat over stock and drive 40+ MPH. 35 MPH would be easily doable, IMHO, and the hole shot would be a little sluggish until you got the prop Mikeski recommended. <BR> <BR>I would expect you to get a good deal on it. The 8.1 L engine is a $14K upgrade and the LY6 is somewhere around a $5K upgrade on a new boat. So factor those in when comparing boats. <BR> <BR>(Message edited by talltigeguy on December 30, 2009)

It's not bad, but if you like buzzing around the lake at high speeds its not going to work out that well. I've only driven it with stock ballast full and about 5-6 people in it, and it was fine out of the hull. You need to put some serious weight in that boat though.

We have the 350 in our 45. If we could do it over again we would opt for the 400. The engine does fine with the stock ballast and 3 people. Any extra weight you have to empty ballast. We would probably see better performance if we changed the prop.