Intel seems to have achieved great success with Lynnfield: the new chips are really doing well, which is evident from the market prices. The Intel Core i5-750 is at the top position in the most popular products in the desktop CPU category and the Core i7-860 ranks four among the most popular CPUs. Thus, Intel's tentative plan of selling a million Lynnfield processors by the end of the year seems to be falling into place. Even the customer has a reason to rejoice - despite the high demand, the prices of Lynnfield chips that are only a few weeks old, are already beginning to drop considerably.

Desktop (PUs: the Lynnfield (PUs are already becoming affordable

In recent times, the prices of the Core i7-870, Core i7-860 and Core i5-750 that have been launched so far have dropped by about 15 percent in the European market and the same is expected in India very soon. The Core i5-750 cannot process eight threads at a time using Intel's Hyper-threading technology, but the i7 chips can. But the absence of this feature is not necessarily a disadvantage, as only programs that use all processor cores to their fullest capacity can run faster with Hyper-threading. In most cases, home / office applications and games do not fall under this.

The attractive price tag of the Core i5-750 makes it our purchase recommendation of the month. Even the only new entrant in the desktop CPUs category deserves a mention. The AMD Athlon II X4 620, priced at around Rs 5,300 is one of the most affordable quad-core processors in our top 50 list and makes it to rank 30 with regard to performance.

In the case of mobile CPUs for laptops, this month is characterized by the mobile Nehalem CPUs from Intel. The three new Clarksfield processors - Core i7-920XM, 820QM and 720QM are now in the top three position of our top 50 mobile CPUs. What is striking is the low clock frequency of the three Core i7 CPUs. The 1.6 to 2.0 GHz specified in the table however, do not stand for the maximum, but the minimum clock frequency. It can be increased by up to 75 percent through the automatic overclocking feature of the mobile Nehalem CPU called Turbo Boost. Although the Core i7-720QM is relatively affordable, considering its top performance, the "Purchase recommendation of the month" title goes to another new entrant: the Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 supersedes the long-time winner, the P8600. With a high clock frequency of 2.53 GHz and an equally sparing 25 watt TOP, this new CPU offers a striking balance of great performance and affordable price tag.

Graphic chips: All clearly leads the pack with DirectX 11

At present the ATI Radeon HD 5870 is officially the new top scorer in our GPU top 50. The DirectX 10.1 already makes the HD 5870 faster than both the dual-GPU graphics cards that dominated so far - Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 and ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2. The second new DirectX 11 card, the ATI Radeon HD 5850 makes its way between these two. Also, thanks to the 40 nm process technology, the power consumption of the two newcomers is absolutely within limits, with 188 and 151 watts of TOP respectively. Now, even Nvidia has introduced the first 40 mn GPU, the GeForce GT 220. In spite of the affordable purchase price of Rs 4,600, this newcomer does not warrant a purchase recommendation. This month, this title still goes to the ATI Radeon HD 4730. With 512 MB GDDR5 memory and a memory speed of 3,600 MHz it offers better value for money at the same price. An alternative in the new 40 nm production is the ATI Radeon HD 4770. It consumes 20 watts lesser power but it's a little more expensive.