8 pin cpu power splitter

[cchalogamer]

1st off like the others have said the power supply is NOT changing your score, might change your max stable OC, but 4.5 Ghz is 4.5 at 600w or 1000w and the extra connector on the board is honestly a marketing gimmick at the power levels of CPUs on Z87/97 platforms.  

 

600w is also more than enough to run the hardware you have listed safely and without issue.

 

The 4 extra "virtual" cores of the i7 are LOVED by synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark and in MOST real world cases the faster 4 threads of the newer i5 will easily win out over the older i7 unless it was clocked to some "equal" level (so add 15% boost for the IvyBridge and Haswell increases EACH to that 4.5Ghz)

 

With that said the variation "feeling" of a PC can more easily be swayed by the video drivers you're running (especially with SLI being involved) than the CPU once you get to a certain level for day to day use as even an "old" Sandy bridge CPU is not that far behind the modern Haswell parts in gaming ability.

 

You mentioned the CPU speed in windows not showing properly, not too surprising really, depending on my OC settings it thinks my 4930K is around stock or 5Ghz with OCs between 4.3 and 4.6.  Many programs just read what the CPU is and list the stock speed.  Run a utility like CPUz from CPUID to see what it's REALLY doing or if you want to monitor min/max CPU clocks along with real time the newest version of hardware monitor works well with most systems.

[ccokeman]

You will also want to run something to put a load on the chip while checking the CPU speed to validate the true boost clock.