All that crap below - I was wrong.

How irritating - to be wrong. After spending precious moments of my lazy time, I decided to make one more go at it - i.e. install another RedHat 8.0 workstation to test the server... the results from the benchmarking I was getting just didn't make sense. Well, I installed again and found benchmark times to be lower than the FreeBSD system in question - and they should be, as this system is 5 times faster (clock-wise) than the FreeBSD setup.

So, I'll say it again - I was wrong...