Thanks to the guys at Gobbler I managed to solve my problem. Not every day do you see a company go that extra mile and give support over a weekend. In case anyone else has a similar issue I did a bit of research based on something the Gobbler crew said in one of their replies and found the culprit. One of my storage drivers (Marvell 91xx SATA 6G Controller) was causing the problem. I've disabled it, as it is not in use, and everything is running at around 70-75 us on the latency check.
Not sure if this may help anyone else with the same problem but I used a utility from sweetwater's website to help me find the driver that was causing the problem :-
http://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/solving-dpc-latency-issues/ Adrian