Not overkill at all, cause I am doing the same thing :). If your doing a custom dash then price up all the gauges you would need ie good quality Speedo, tacho, fuel level, oil pressure, engine temp, may be boost/vac, may be volts, may be air fuel ratio, may be exhaust temp, may be tranmission temp. Then on top of that you may need sensors to run some or all of those gauges plus running wiring to all gauges. I reccon just to price up the necessary good quality gauges would be $700 to $1000 which is almost the price of the racepak iq3 dash. It would be quite a hassel and time consuming, for me to go gauges. The dash is one neat looking unit and it can display what ever you need, well up to 6 items anyways from memory.