lol

That is still ridiculously low.

A leak is a leak, it doesn't change because it's under vacuum/boost.  Is the intercooler solid?  Is that leaking?  If you've smoke tested it and NO smoke is coming out, at all, under pressurisation up to 40psi, there is no leak.

If you disconnect the wastegate line and still only make 15psi, your turbo is dead.

i didnt pressure test anything, just smoke. the turbo is brand new, i just installed it a little over a month ago. its been like this since day one. i never drove the car on the stock turbo as there was no compressor wheel left in it. it self machined the wheel down till it was just an aluminum cone. one of the many problems the car had and thus why i got it for a 1000 bucks. i mean i feel i scored because the car only has 144,000 miles, its an 02 150hp car originally, it had some cheapo manzo lowering spring on stock shocks, poly control arm bushings, the ebay FMIC setup, forge splitter diverter valve, 3in turbo back exhaust with cat delete of unknown origin, euro R32 bumpers and side skirts, the original ECU had a revo tune on it and thats about it. the bad was the shocks where shot so it got a raceland ultimo coilovers, the turbo was obviously shot so i just grabbed up a cheap ebay K03S, put some good tires on it. now the only thing that needs attention thats cosmetic is the paint, the idiots tried to paint the car some dodge blue color when the car was originally black. it looks like they threw a hand full of dirt in the pain when they was mixing it. other than that its just minor cosmetic details that the car needs like replacing missing and broken plastic interior pieces, getting it back to its original color, the bumpers are rigged to the car very poorly and it could use a new set of covers honestly, the exhaust was hung by wire and not the factory rubber hangers too, there was no tip on it at all and the exhaust blew part of the R32 fiberglass rear cover apart. its a bit of a mess but for a 1000 bucks i could part it out and make my money back and probably still end up ahead of the game even though i have money into fixing it in my attempt to keep it whole. oh it had some cheapo cold air intake on it too with a cheapo rusty air filter, thats been replaced with an intake setup i made that put the filter back in the engine bay with a heat shield and a new K&N filter that has a blox velocity stack. im also going to just re-do the intercooler piping because i have audi TT 225 HP intake manifold that faces the drivers side and i think i can make a better piping setup than the ebay one plus i like the path of the piping for the audi TT over the golf/jetta along with the audi TT engine plastics i have to put on it just for something different cosmetically.

punctuation and paragraphs, man.

I just didn't read it cause it burned my eyes when I tried.

thats one i havnt seen happening yet. looks like i may have to take the downpipe off and check the flap.
what i was wondering also is what is a stock 180hp GTI supposed to run boost wise? worst case i'll just revert the car back to stock and start over with it. i still have all of the stock parts that came off of it. honestly i always hated working on or finishing someone elses projects, normally things are so out of whack from the start its easier to go back to stock and make the car run right before mods than it is to try and carry on with what they started.

They should have no problem hitting a PR of 2.4... Depending on IC, that's easily 19psi or more.

Now, I'm not sure how long they'll last at those levels, but with the WG completely shut, it should hit at least 24-25 psi.