The power usage of this system is almost 420 watts, that is significantly higher than it was before the processor upgrade, I posted the power usage of the system running the 8350 above, this shows - 100% CPU at 340 watts, thats about 80 watts less (bear in mind both are snapshots at a given time) so I don't think the bois is limiting the power and hence the processor speed.

I've been looking at some of the reviews on this processor, they all come to the same conclusion, give of take, that the ship is a 'show peice' and only an 8350 o/c'd to 5Ghz turbo which explains why this chip is almost impossible to overclock! Although I have seen some reports that show it at 5.2, how stable that would be remains to be seen...

I'm going to put the 8350 back in that machine at the weekend and over clock it to 4.8 like the other machine, then I can see how the power compares as I have the link commander in that machine to monitor power usage with reasonable accuracy.

The other ting to keep in mind is that the benchmarks are variable, as shown below, 2 benchmark tests 12 minutes or so apart

02/10/2013 21:23:19 |  | Benchmark results:
02/10/2013 21:23:19 |  | Number of CPUs: 8
02/10/2013 21:23:19 |  | 3223 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
02/10/2013 21:23:19 |  | 11647 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU
02/10/2013 21:23:20 |  | [task] Resuming computation
02/10/2013 21:28:53 |  | [task] Suspending computation - time of day
02/10/2013 21:34:51 |  | Running CPU benchmarks
02/10/2013 21:35:22 |  | Benchmark results:
02/10/2013 21:35:22 |  | Number of CPUs: 8
02/10/2013 21:35:22 |  | 3237 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
02/10/2013 21:35:22 |  | 11982 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU