Core i5-480M: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The Intel Core i5-480M is a first-generation Arrandale dual-core, released in 2011 as solid mid-range silicon of its day — and five catalog laptops carry it, HP ProBooks and a Lenovo B-series machine from the 2010–2013 window. Measured against the modern catalog it meets the recommended CPU tier in 0 of the 69 tracked games, and clears no minimum bar either. This guide covers its ranking, its specifications, and the laptops it ships in.

Where the Core i5-480M sits in 2026

A catalog score of 7.4 places the chip 578th of 741 scored laptop CPUs — deep in the legacy tier. The neighborhood is strictly old-school budget territory: the Core i7-3537U (7.5), Pentium G3240 (7.5) and Celeron 4205U (7.5) just above, and the Core i5-460M (7.4), Atom x7-Z8700 (7.3) and Core i3-390M (7.2) just below. Fifteen-plus years of silicon separate this part from relevance in any modern workload, and the ranking states it plainly.

What the chip brings

Arrandale gives the chip two cores and four threads on a 32 nm process with a 35 W rating — 2.66 GHz base with turbo up to 2.93 GHz, its mid-range feature in a generation where the i3s ran fixed clocks. Public benchmarks read 371 single-core and 707 multi-core in Geekbench, numbers that define the floor of the catalog's scoring range. In 2011 this was respectable mainstream performance; in 2026 it is the measure of how far laptops have come.

Games: CPU-side readiness

As a processor, the chip sits below the minimum CPU requirement of all 69 cataloged games — the lightest tracked titles, Minecraft and League of Legends included, ask for more than this. There is no recommended-tier conversation to have, and the CPU-only framing does not soften it: actual playability would further depend on the laptop's GPU and RAM, which in this roster are of the same vintage. For gaming, this chip retired years ago.

Laptops that carry it

The roster runs HP's ProBook 4720s at $162 and 6450b at $120 from 2013, the Lenovo B560 at $122, and the ProBook 6550b at $127 and 4520s at $115 from 2010. The laptops built around it typically show a median best CPU score of 9.7, a performance index of 14.5, office comfort of 30, energy efficiency of 26.3 and mobility of 11. Every number describes early-2010s entry hardware: sturdy enough, slow by any current standard, and cheap.

Bottom line

The Core i5-480M in 2026 is a utility-only proposition: light browsing, documents and media playback on a $115–$162 machine, with patience required for anything heavier. It fits the role of an emergency spare, a single-purpose typing station or a donor chassis for parts. For any real workload — let alone games — the catalog's rankings point firmly elsewhere, and even small steps upward buy large gains from this baseline.