Core i7-5500U: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The Intel Core i7-5500U was the premium ultrabook chip of 2015 — a Broadwell dual-core that powered a generation of thin business portables. Ten catalog laptops carry it today, all in the budget used range. Measured against the catalog's 69 tracked games, it clears the recommended CPU tier for none of them, though it still meets the minimum bar for a meaningful set of titles. This guide covers where the chip sits among laptop CPUs, what it brings, and which laptops carry it.

Where the Core i7-5500U sits in 2026

A catalog score of 27.7 places the chip 398th of 741 scored laptop CPUs — the lower half of the table. The neighborhood: the Athlon Gold 3150U (27.9), Core i5-4200M (27.8) and Core i3-6157U (27.8) just above, and the Core i7-3632QM (27.5), Pentium Gold G6400 (27.4) and Core i5-5250U (27.2) just below. The i7-3632QM comparison is telling: a 2012 quad-core flagship now ranks beneath this 15 W dual-core, which is how a decade of efficiency progress shows up in the numbers. Otherwise the message is simple — this is 2015 mid-tier silicon, and nothing around it has changed that.

What the chip brings

Broadwell-U is a 2-core, 4-thread design on Intel's first 14 nm process, rated at 15 W: a 2.4 GHz base clock that boosts to 3.0 GHz. The integrated GPU is Intel HD Graphics 6000 — the stronger of the two Broadwell iGPU options, but still strictly a display adapter by modern standards. Public benchmark records read 881 single-core and 1,692 multi-core in Geekbench-type testing, with a 2,804 PassMark overall score; memory configuration details were not captured for this chip, so the table above sticks to what the catalog verifiably holds.

Games: CPU-side readiness

Measured purely as a processor, the Core i7-5500U meets the recommended CPU tier for 0 of 69 cataloged games. It clears the minimum CPU bar for 26 of them — Minecraft, Valorant, Dota 2, League of Legends, Sims 4, Doom Eternal, Death Stranding, God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn among them — while everything from Cyberpunk 2077 down to Counter-Strike 2 asks for more processor than this. In other words: 2015-class minimums, nothing more. These verdicts are CPU-only — actual playability depends on the laptop's GPU and RAM, and Broadwell-era integrated graphics sets a hard ceiling on its own.

Laptops that carry it

The 10-model roster is almost entirely the 2015 corporate fleet: ThinkPad X1 Carbon 3rd Gen, T450, L450 and E550, HP's EliteBook Folio 1040 G2, and Dell's Latitude 3550 and E3540, joined by a Pavilion 15 and two Inspiron 17 desktop-replacements. Priced models run $142–$381, which frames the value story: premium chassis of their day, entry-level money now. Laptops built around it typically show a median office comfort score of 50, energy efficiency at 55.3, portability around 40 and a performance index of 32 — honest numbers for machines that were built to be light typers, not workhorses.

Bottom line

The Core i7-5500U is a word-processing and browsing chip, and the laptops around it know it. For $150–$250 a buyer gets an excellent keyboard, a light chassis and enough processor for office work, streaming video and the lightest esports titles at minimum settings — but zero recommended-tier game clears and a 398th-place ranking close the book on anything more ambitious. It remains a sensible cheap secondary or student machine, provided the expectations stay in 2015 with it.