Core i5-11500H: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The Intel Core i5-11500H was the workhorse of Tiger Lake-H: six cores and twelve threads in a 35 W envelope, equally at home in business machines and mobile workstations. Nine catalog laptops carry it — a fleet dominated by Dell Precision and ThinkPad P-series hardware — and as a processor it clears the recommended CPU tier in 52 of the 69 games the catalog tracks. This guide covers where the chip sits among laptop CPUs, what it brings, and which laptops carry it.

Where the Core i5-11500H sits in 2026

A catalog score of 67.8 places the chip 97th of 741 scored laptop CPUs — the top seventh of the table. The neighborhood is stacked: the Ryzen 9 4900H (68.4), Xeon E-2286M (67.9) and Ryzen 7 7730U (67.8) sit just above, while the Core i9-13900HX (67.6), Ryzen 7 4800HS (67.6) and Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U (67.6) sit just below. Trading places with a 13th-generation i9 HX flagship from a position two rungs down Intel's own 2021 lineup tells the story: this was the sweet-spot H-chip of its generation, and a top-100 placement keeps it relevant five years on.

What the chip brings

Tiger Lake H45 is a 6-core, 12-thread design on Intel's 10 nm-class process, rated at 35 W: a 2.9 GHz base clock that boosts to 4.6 GHz. The integrated GPU is UHD Graphics for 11th Gen — basic display output, no more, since the workstations this chip lives in carry professional discrete graphics. Public benchmark records read 1,775 single-core and 6,057 multi-core Geekbench-type scores with a 15,452 PassMark overall; 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 52 of 69 cataloged games — Alan Wake 2, Counter-Strike 2, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Forza Horizon 5, Black Myth Wukong, Ghost of Tsushima and The Last of Us Part 1 among them. Fifteen titles sit at the minimum tier, including Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring and Fortnite, and only Starfield and Helldivers 2 ask for more processor than this. These verdicts are CPU-only — actual playability depends on the laptop's GPU and RAM, and this chip's surrounding fleet leans on professional rather than gaming graphics.

Laptops that carry it

The nine-model roster is a 2021–2022 professional fleet: Dell's Precision 3561, 5560, 7560, 7760 and 17 5760 workstations ($405–$721), the ThinkPad P15 and P17 Gen 2 ($901–$1,089), and Dell's Latitude 5421 and 5521 business machines ($422–$438). Laptops built around it typically show a median best CPU score near 74, office comfort at a perfect 100, a photo/design index of 83 and energy efficiency at 78.9 — against a best GPU score median of 48, a reminder that these are compute-first machines with professional graphics rather than gaming rigs. Portability sits at a middling 33.

Bottom line

The Core i5-11500H is a quiet bargain for buyers who need sustained processor throughput on a budget: 52 recommended-tier game clears, top-100 placement, and a roster of Precision and ThinkPad P workstations now priced $405–$1,089 — serious hardware that has depreciated hard. It is not the pick for high-refresh gaming, since the professional GPUs around it trail gaming-class cards. But for engineering workloads, code builds, content creation and the occasional game, this chip still delivers i9-neighborhood performance at an i5 price.