Apart from the very occasional bundle, I can't remember the last time we recommended a deal on a CPU. Monitors, yes. Gaming PCs, definitely. But not CPUs, because however well-priced they are, it's hard to recommend a system upgrade when buying the rest of the system needed to go along with it is so damn expensive. I'm not entirely surprised, then, that Mercury Research says that desktop CPU shipments from AMD and Intel "in the second quarter are best described as ugly."
According to the market research firm, this is the case despite growth in the overall CPU market:
