KitGuru spent Saturday afternoon shopping in centres packed with folks stocking up on Mother's Day gifts. While the world looked out for that ‘special something that would make the moment', KitGuru was looking around the electronics shelves and noticed something rather surprising. Here's a quick story and a pic – tell us if you notice the same thing.

While the enthusiast market leapt at the chance to own a 2500k or 2600k processor almost immediately after launch, the Intel recall on Sandybridge – combined with inventory over-stocking through Q3 and Q4 2010 by companies like Acer, appears to have had a huge impact on speed of introduction for the lower-end chips.

Superior graphics processing for integrated processors will manifest itself in better game play as well as improved video quality. Both of these are features that should be very appealing to a ‘regular user' who wants a cool system for home use.

Likewise, the addition processing power that Sandy Bridge chips manage to pull out of every watt available represents a significant improvement over previous generations.

Wolfdale processors like Intel's E7500 were launched more than 2 years ago. With 2 standard cores, no Hyper Threading and no Turbo Boost capability – these chips represent what Intel was good at doing in a by-gone era. The latest Intel processors in this class are, actually, in a class above.

It would seem that the delay in getting affordable new processors to market has meant that companies like Sony are forced to carry on pushing archaic chips into high-street stores like PC World/Dixons/Currys.

KitGuru says: We know that customers in these stores probably don't know any better, but it still seems like a ‘bad trick' to sell them systems costing well over £1,000 with such tired processors. Come on Intel, let's see the dark doors of the past blown away with some fresh i3 products into the entry-level space. Just because these customers don't know, doesn't mean we shouldn't care!

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