That sounds strange to me. Maybe the client doesn't take advantage of the surplus cores the AMD CPU has. As a developer, I know that sometimes when building multi-threaded applications, you can only support CPUs of a certain number of cores. If the client only supports up to 4 cores, then obvious the i7 will be stronger, but if it supported up to 8 cores, the 8350 should have been able to keep up.
Anyway glad this is working out for you.