Core i7-4800MQ: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The Intel Core i7-4800MQ was the step-up Haswell quad-core of 2013, and six catalog laptops carry it today — a mix of business workhorses and mobile workstations from the 2013–2014 window. Judged as a processor, it clears the recommended CPU tier in 15 of the 69 games the catalog tracks. This guide walks through its ranking, its specs, and the machines it lives in.

Where the Core i7-4800MQ sits in 2026

A catalog score of 44.7 puts the chip 295th of 741 scored laptop CPUs — mid-table, but respectable for thirteen-year-old silicon. Its immediate neighborhood mixes eras: the Core i7-4810MQ (45.8) — its own Haswell successor — the Core i7-7567U (45.6) and Pentium Gold 7505 (45.5) just above, and the Core i5-7440HQ (44.7), Ryzen 7 3750H (44.4) and Core i7-4710MQ (43.7) just below. Scoring dead level with a Kaby Lake-H quad-core from four years later tells the story: this was one of the strongest mobile CPUs money could buy in 2013.

What the chip brings

Like the rest of the 4800 line, this is a four-core, eight-thread Haswell on a 22 nm process with a 47 W H-class rating — 2.7 GHz base and up to 3.7 GHz boost, 300 MHz higher than the base 4700MQ model. The integrated HD Graphics 4600 is display-only in practice; the workstations this chip shipped in carried professional discrete graphics. Public benchmarks land at 1,067 single-core and 3,173 multi-core in Geekbench, with a PassMark rating of 5,770 — modest numbers today, but they still edge out the sibling chips around it in the ranking.

Games: CPU-side readiness

As a processor alone, the chip meets the recommended CPU tier for 15 of 69 cataloged games — titles like God of War, Grand Theft Auto V, Overwatch, Horizon Zero Dawn, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Civilization 6. Another broad group clears the minimum bar but not the recommended one: Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Witcher 3, Alan Wake 2 and Dota 2 among them. The heaviest modern releases — Starfield, Helldivers 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, Fortnite, Hogwarts Legacy — are beyond it. Keep in mind these are CPU-only verdicts: real playability is decided by the laptop's GPU and RAM, and 2013–2014 machines carry graphics that age far faster than this processor did.

Laptops that carry it

The roster spans six machines: Dell's Precision M4800 and M6800 workstations from 2014 at $221 and $352, the Latitude E6540 business laptop at $159, and Lenovo's ThinkPad T540p, W540 and T440p from 2013 at $147, $264 and $145. Because several of these carried professional discrete graphics, the laptops built around the chip typically show a median best GPU score of 30.2 and a gaming index of 51.5 — notably stronger than most Haswell-era fleets. Median office comfort sits at 50, energy efficiency at 46.5, and mobility at just 12.5, the familiar cost of thick 15-inch workstation chassis.

Bottom line

The Core i7-4800MQ is legacy-tier in 2026, but it is the smarter end of legacy: the extra clock speed over the 4700MQ and the workstation bodies it shipped in make these machines honest used-market buys for productivity and older games. Buyers get eight threads, upgradeable business chassis and sub-$350 prices — with no expectation of modern gaming or battery life. For a cheap durable work laptop, it holds up; for anything GPU-heavy or new, look further up the table.