Sorry for the very delayed response. Been a long few days, and just finished a full day of working on my jeep. Life sucks when you have to mechanic more than work on your pc 
Anyways, [USER=259]@aquelito[/USER] correct me if I'm wrong (kinda tired atm, so my thinking may be off) but couldn't you theoretically get a higher ceiling for the cpu depending on the power supply used? Some rough napkin math; assuming I had a 24 volt supply with the boards connector being rated at 10 amps that should give me around 240W in a perfect world. According to the charts here the gpu only uses ~72 watts.
That still leaves 168W for the rest of the system, and at max usage that card only uses 2.9 amps (taken from the same article). I feel like I'm missing something here, considering my card would use even slightly less than the figures shown here.
EDIT: Corrected a few numbers, I shouldn't math when tired.
EDIT2: I read through your post more thoroughly, you're using a 12 volt supply to avoid the need to use a board to step the voltage for the card down to 12 volt. That's exactly what I was missing so nevermind my question
Using that supply the math makes more sense at 120W minus the 72W for the card and 35W for the CPU only leaves 13W for ram etc.
