Core i5-5200U: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The Intel Core i5-5200U is a fifth-generation Broadwell-U dual-core from 2015 — the mainstream 15 W chip inside the mid-2010s business ultrabooks that now stock the affordable end of the used market. The catalog matches it to 27 models, and it does not meet the recommended CPU requirement in any of the 69 games the site tracks, though a band of lighter titles clears the minimum tier. This guide covers where the chip sits among laptop CPUs, what it brings to a portable, and which laptops carry it.

Where the Core i5-5200U sits in 2026

A catalog score of 23.9 places the chip 426th of 672 scored laptop CPUs — the lower-middle of a table that spans two decades of silicon. The neighborhood is a mixed bag of eras and badges: the Pentium G4600 (24.2), Core i7-3615QM (24) and Core i5-2450P (24) just above, the Core i7-7600U (23.8), Ryzen 3 3250U (23.7) and Core i5-4300U (23.6) just below. Sitting within half a point of an i7-branded Core i7-7600U says plenty about the era: the U-series ladder moved in fractions, and a badge premium bought very little distance.

What the chip brings

Broadwell-U is a 2-core, 4-thread design on a 14 nm process, rated at 15 W in its U-series configuration: a 2.2 GHz base clock and up to 2.7 GHz boost. Memory support tops out at 16 GB of DDR3 across two channels at 25 GB/s, and Intel HD Graphics 5500 handles display duties. In public benchmarks the chip posts 785 single-core and 1,510 multi-core in Geekbench, alongside a PassMark overall score of 2,502 — office-class numbers by any modern measure.

Games: CPU-side readiness

Measured purely as a processor, the chip meets the recommended CPU tier for 0 of 69 cataloged games. The realistic ceiling is the minimum tier: Minecraft, League of Legends, Dota 2, Valorant, Sims 4, Diablo 4, F1 24, Doom Eternal, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, God of War, Grand Theft Auto V and Civilization 6 all list the chip above their minimum but below their recommended CPU requirement. Everything else lands below even the minimum bar — Cyberpunk 2077, Fortnite, Counter-Strike 2, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Overwatch among them. These verdicts are CPU-only — whether a game actually plays well depends on the laptop's GPU and RAM, and the HD 5500 graphics built into these machines is usually the harder limit.

Laptops that carry it

The 27-model roster is classic used-market stock, dominated by 2015 business machines: Dell's Latitude E7450 at $120, E5450 at $136 and E5550 at $245, HP's EliteBook 820 G2 at $124, EliteBook 840 G2 at $135, EliteBook 750 G2 at $190 and EliteBook Folio 1040 G2 at $184, plus the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (3rd Gen) at $152, a Vostro 15 3539 at $160 and an IdeaPad B50-50 at $172. A Latitude 3380 dated 2016 sits at $121, and the roster's ceiling is a Latitude 3450 dated 2023 at $536 — an outlier worth judging on its own listing. Roster medians describe the fleet honestly: office comfort at 50, a performance index of 30.8, mobility 40 and portability 53.3 — everyday-carry territory — while a gaming-index median of 71 is pulled up by stronger-GPU listings in the wider 24-model pool, not by the typical HD 5500 business machine.

Bottom line

The Core i5-5200U is a $120 to $250-class office chip in 2026: fine for browsing, documents, calls and the lighter end of the minimum tier, and outclassed for anything modern and demanding. Buyers should treat these laptops as cheap, durable workhorses — the Latitude E7450 and EliteBook 840 G2 around $120 to $135 are the archetype — and check RAM, battery and screen condition before anything else. Anyone shopping for gaming should look further up the table; this chip clears no recommended CPU tiers at all.