Lets look at some port photos, and compare them to the High Dollar Iron heads.
First off, the TA intake gasket, fits very nicely to the out of the box ports.
Here is a quick "eyeball" of the intake flanges on the respective heads. The Competition ported 430 heads are slightly bigger, .010 wider, and .020 taller, than the as cast Aluminum head. Bottom line here is, if your going to spend some extra money on these new heads, bring them up to roller cam motor specs, most of the work is already done, and there are improvements in the exhaust bowl area, that you simply could not do in the iron heads, as you would hit the water jackets.
Here is the exhaust bowls. The 430 Heads were customer take-offs, that were done by our porting vendor, a number of years ago, and they are a touch dirty, so I popped a couple of valves out, and threw them in the blaster, so we could get a good look at the big buck porting work on them.
This is the 430 Head exhaust bowl, after extensive time with the grinder. These heads are very thin, toward the water jacket, on the LH side of the picture here.
And the out of the box Aluminum head exhaust bowl. Untouched..
And the iron heads fully ported intake bowl area. Considerable time was spent here. And time is money..
And the as cast intake bowl of the aluminum head. Note the nicely centered and laid back valve guide.