Core i5-14500HX: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The Intel Core i5-14500HX is proof of how far the i5 badge has climbed: 14 cores and 20 threads on Raptor Lake HX silicon, aimed squarely at 2024's gaming laptops. Nine catalog laptops carry it, and as a processor it clears the recommended CPU tier in 68 of the 69 games the catalog tracks — the single most complete CPU-side coverage in this guide's cohort. This guide covers where the chip sits among laptop CPUs, what it brings, and which machines were built around it.

Where the Core i5-14500HX sits in 2026

A catalog score of 87.6 places the chip 23rd of 741 scored laptop CPUs — the top three percent of the table. The neighborhood is all modern flagships: the Core Ultra 5 225H (88), Ryzen 9 7940HS (88) and Ryzen AI 7 350 (87.9) just above, the Ryzen 9 8945HS (87.2), Core Ultra 9 185H (87) and Ryzen 7 7840HS (86.5) just below. An i5 trading blows with Ryzen 9s and a Core Ultra 9 is the Raptor Lake HX bargain in one line: desktop-class core counts wearing a mid-tier badge, and nothing within three places of it being older than 2023.

What the chip brings

Raptor Lake-HX Refresh is a 14-core, 20-thread hybrid design on a 7 nm-class process, rated at 55 W: a 2.6 GHz base clock that boosts to 4.9 GHz. The integrated GPU is Iris Xe Graphics G7 with 80 execution units — a fallback rather than a feature, since every laptop in this roster carries a discrete gaming GPU. Public benchmark records read 2,273 single-core and 11,938 multi-core Geekbench-type scores; 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 chip meets the recommended CPU tier for 68 of 69 cataloged games — Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, Hogwarts Legacy, Helldivers 2, Alan Wake 2, Black Myth Wukong and Counter-Strike 2 among them. The lone exception is Starfield, which sits at the minimum tier — the only tracked title whose recommended requirement nudges past this chip. In other words, the processor is effectively never the bottleneck in modern games. These verdicts are CPU-only; actual playability depends on the laptop's GPU and RAM, and in this fleet those components are built to match the chip.

Laptops that carry it

The nine-model roster is 2024 gaming hardware through and through: Lenovo's LOQ 15IRX9 and 15IRX10 and Legion Pro 5i Gen 9, Acer's Nitro 16 and Predator Helios Neo 16, HP's Victus 16 in two guises and the HyperX Omen 15 at the $1,800 top — with the ThinkBook 16p Gen 5 as the lone business entry at $1,007. Laptops built around it typically show a median best CPU score near 90, engineering and modeling indices at 96, a gaming index of 82, office comfort at a perfect 100 and energy efficiency at 80.6 — offset by a portability median of 27. These are performance machines first.

Bottom line

The Core i5-14500HX is the value play at the top of the market: 23rd place overall, 68 recommended-tier game clears, and a $1,007–$1,800 roster of well-equipped 2024 gaming laptops where the CPU will outlast most buying cycles. Only Starfield's recommended bar escapes it, and only just. The honest cost is bulk and battery — 55 W silicon means desk-class chassis with portability medians in the twenties. For a buyer who wants flagship processing without paying flagship-laptop prices, this chip is one of the strongest arguments in the catalog.