Is the hotfix that makes Windows 7 take advantage of all the cores/performance on the 8350 still relevant?
is this about core parking?
I think so. Windows 7 was shutting down unused cores or something to that effect. I remember people making noise about this a while back with the 8350 vs 3570K. Is this still an issue, or has it been resolved with an update?
not sure but there's a registry edit that can be done to disable it. it saves on power but i heard windows was a little slow to re-activate the cores resulting in poor performance.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2646060
seems like it's still an issue, i would look up the registery edit that lets you disable it completely as that hotfix just makes less likely for the core to park itself. you might even be able to go into your bios and disable the c6 power state on your processor.
There was another hotfix that had better (excuse my lack of knowledge on the actual terms) thread management that would task 2 cores on the same module with the same or similar tasks in order to boost performance for that architecture. I have tried installing both hotfixes (although I have c6 state disabled in bios) but both of them say "This hotfix is not applicable to this machine."
I'm pretty sure with the SP1 update that it took care of that? If not, here are the links, not sure if these are the ones you have tried:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2645594
http://www.techpowerup.com/158534/new-windows-7-bulldozer-patches-available.html
Hope this helps!