With pump gas cubic TORQUE is your friend. I love Hollis's 406 but for most moderate weight real street pump gasser s you'd have to gear the wee out of it to stay int he sweet spot. Horsepower is in the head flow and it's just more genereally practical to build the bottom end for torque and target your headflow for the HP you want.

A 406 and 511 can both be built to easily make over 600 hp but the samller motor will have to turn a proportionate amount of RPM higher. But the bigger motor will always produce more torque below peak torque RPM which is where a pump gasser is going to spend 85-90% of it's life.

The 511 with a low deck 4.375" bore 4.25" arm and a 6.535" arm has about the same bottom end rod ratio geometry as a standard 454 BB Chevy. A 496 (4.15") stroke is just about as good but the 15 extra cubes and lighter bobweight of the smaller rod journals makes what's already great just a little 'more better'. To me a 470 (3.90") stroke small journal low deck is near equal to the (4.15"), 493 Tall deck and nearly equal overall to even a 496 low deck, so the smaller journals themselves (which amounts to nearly 1 less rod's worth of bearing swept area because the bearing is also slightly thinner) seem to be worth a bit of power and RPM above the torque peak. Opinions vary of course, but having built every stroker combination I'd say the 511/496 advantage is a bit more than just the cubes themselves.

Larger bore to stroke ratio motors will almost always make more HP per cube, but it simply (obviously) becomes a matter of more practical packaging since you can more readily increase stroke than you can with bore.

bottom Line you can get to 600hp on pump gas with even a standard size 383 combo....with enough head and cam but on pump gas the stroker gives you higher average torque across the powerband which is really what you usually want on the street, particularly an average sized automatic. Also the converter stall/flash for a 600HP will generally feel more satisfying at part throttle the more cubes you have. for a 4 speed car, the cube preference is a little more subjective