Core i5-6300U: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The Intel Core i5-6300U is a sixth-generation Skylake dual-core catalog-dated 2015 — the 15 W engine of the mid-2010s corporate fleet refresh, and now a staple of the used market's budget tier. The catalog matches it to 24 models, and it does not meet the recommended CPU requirement in any of the 69 games the site tracks. This guide covers where the chip sits among laptop CPUs, what it brings to a portable, and which laptops carry it.

Where the Core i5-6300U sits in 2026

A catalog score of 21.5 places the chip 444th of 672 scored laptop CPUs — the lower third of a table that spans two decades of silicon. The neighborhood is all budget territory: the Celeron 4305U (21.8), Pentium Gold G6400T (21.8) and Core i5-4250U (21.7) just above, the Core i5-4330M (21.1), Core i3-5020U (21.1) and Core i5-4200U (20.9) just below. Rubbing shoulders with Celerons and Pentiums while carrying an i5 badge is the honest picture: the catalog's scoring weighs what the silicon does, not the sticker on it.

What the chip brings

Skylake-U is a 2-core, 4-thread design on a 14 nm process rated at 15 W: a 2.4 GHz base clock and up to 3.0 GHz boost. Memory support spans DDR3 and DDR4, up to 32 GB across two channels at 34 GB/s, with Intel HD Graphics 520 integrated. Public benchmarks peg it at 587 single-core and 1,313 multi-core in Geekbench with a PassMark overall score of 3,200 — entry-level figures by any modern standard.

Games: CPU-side readiness

Measured purely as a processor, the chip meets the recommended CPU tier for 0 of 69 cataloged games, and its minimum-tier list is a short one: Minecraft, League of Legends, Dota 2, Valorant, Sims 4, F1 24, Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto V, Batman: Arkham Knight, Rainbow Six Siege, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Civilization 6. Below that bar sit Diablo 4, Doom Eternal and Overwatch, and beyond them effectively the whole modern catalog — Cyberpunk 2077, Fortnite, Counter-Strike 2, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and more. These verdicts are CPU-only — whether a game actually plays well depends on the laptop's GPU and RAM, and an HD 520 machine asks a lot of its settings sliders.

Laptops that carry it

The 24-model roster is a corporate-fleet snapshot spanning 2015 through 2017: Lenovo's ThinkPad T470 at $182, T470s at $137 and T580 at $261, plus Dell's Latitude 7480 at $135, 7280 at $174, 5480 at $184 and 5580 at $159 from 2016, and the E-series — E5470 at $167, E5570 at $194, E7270 at $184, E7470 at $211 and E5270 at $362 — from the generation before. Every displayed machine is a business laptop; there is no consumer or gaming angle here. Roster medians describe the fleet honestly: office comfort at 50, a performance index of 26.4, mobility 47.5 and portability 67.1 — proper carry-anywhere laptops — while a gaming index of 23 confirms these are integrated-graphics office tools.

Bottom line

The Core i5-6300U is the classic $150-business-laptop engine: dependable for office work, remote sessions and browser-heavy days, wrapped in some of the best-built chassis of the era. As a gaming purchase it is a non-starter — no recommended-tier clears and only the shortest minimum list — so weigh RAM and screen condition over any performance hopes. For a cheap, sturdy typing machine, the ThinkPad T470 and Latitude 7480 class at $135 to $182 is exactly what this chip is for.