Core i7-4600U: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The Intel Core i7-4600U is a Haswell dual-core from the 4th Core generation, released in 2013 — the flagship low-voltage option of its year, the chip premium business ultrabooks were advertised around. The catalog matches it to 11 models. It meets the recommended CPU requirement in 0 of the 69 games the site tracks, clearing only minimum tiers. This guide covers where the chip sits among laptop CPUs, what it brings to a portable, and which laptops carry it.

Where the Core i7-4600U sits in 2026

A catalog score of 26.9 places the chip 401st of 672 scored laptop CPUs — below the midpoint of a table that spans two decades of silicon. The neighborhood: the Core i7-3632QM (27.5), Pentium Gold G6400 (27.4) and Core i5-5250U (27.2) just above, the Core i7-3820QM (26.8), Pentium G5600 (26.8) and its sibling Core i7-4510U (26.7) just below. Landing within half a point of older i7-branded parts is the honest story — the badge here bought efficiency and boost clocks rather than headline throughput, and a decade of silicon progress has moved the goalposts well past it.

What the chip brings

Haswell-ULT is a 2-core, 4-thread design on a 22 nm process, rated at 15 W in its U-series configuration: a 2.1 GHz base clock and up to 3.3 GHz boost. The integrated HD Graphics 5000 handles display duties. Memory support and cache details were not captured for this chip, so the table above sticks to what the catalog verifiably holds: 885 single-core and 1,629 multi-core in Geekbench, plus a PassMark score of 2,716.

Games: CPU-side readiness

Measured purely as a processor, the chip meets the recommended CPU tier for 0 of 69 cataloged games. It clears the minimum CPU tier for 26 of them — Minecraft, Valorant, Dota 2, League of Legends and Sims 4 at the light end, with Grand Theft Auto V, Overwatch, Doom Eternal, Death Stranding, Borderlands 3, God of War and Civilization 6 further up the list. The demanding end — Starfield, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, Counter-Strike 2, Fortnite — sits below its minimum CPU tier. These verdicts are CPU-only: whether a game actually plays well depends on the laptop's GPU and RAM, and integrated Haswell graphics will be the first limit in most of these machines.

Laptops that carry it

The 11-model roster is uniformly business-class, 2013 through 2014: ThinkPad T440s at $183, ThinkPad X240 at $142, Latitude E7440 at $147, Latitude E7240 at $160, Dell Latitude E5440 at $147, Latitude E5540 at $227, EliteBook 840 G1 at $120, EliteBook 820 G1 at $137, EliteBook 850 G1 at $174, EliteBook Folio 1040 G1 at $167 and EliteBook Folio 9480m at $135 — used-market listing prices for premium chassis of the era. Roster medians describe the fleet, not the chip: portability at 64.4 and mobility at 44 fit the thin-and-light brief, office comfort sits at 30 and energy efficiency at 54.7, while a gaming index of 71 and a best GPU score of 45.85 reflect the laptops' graphics options rather than the processor.

Bottom line

The Core i7-4600U suits a buyer who wants a cheap, well-built business ultrabook for office work: $120 to $227 buys ThinkPad and EliteBook chassis that were flagship machines when new. For gaming the honest answer is no — recommended tier in 0 of 69 tracked games, with the minimum-tier list above as the ceiling, GPU permitting. As a student typewriter, a travel machine or a web terminal it remains serviceable; for anything demanding, newer silicon at a similar used price makes more sense.