Core i7-7820HQ: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The Intel Core i7-7820HQ is a seventh-generation Kaby Lake processor from 2017, a 45 W quad-core that anchored premium business laptops and mobile workstations of its era. Eleven models in the catalog carry it, and it clears the recommended CPU requirement in 30 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 i7-7820HQ sits in 2026

A catalog score of 49.4 places the chip 270th of 741 scored laptop CPUs — the middle of the table. The neighborhood reaches across generations: the Core i5-1240P, Core 5 320 and Ryzen 5 7430U sit just above, the Core Ultra 5 332 and 322 alongside, and its own sibling Core i7-7700HQ just below. Holding pace on the catalog score with 2023-era Core Ultra 5 chips is respectable for 2017 silicon — though those newer parts do it at a fraction of the power draw.

What the chip brings

Kaby Lake-H gives the i7-7820HQ four cores and eight threads on a 14 nm process, running 2.9 GHz base with up to 3.9 GHz turbo under a 45 W HQ rating. The integrated graphics are Intel HD Graphics 630 — basic output duty, since machines with this chip were expected to carry a discrete GPU for real work. Public benchmarks land mid-pack for the era: Geekbench single-core 1,188, multi-core 3,568, PassMark 7,155.

Games: CPU-side readiness

Measured purely as a processor, the chip clears the recommended CPU tier for 30 of 69 cataloged games — Death Stranding, Doom Eternal, Borderlands 3, Watch Dogs Legion, Atomic Heart, Spider-Man Miles Morales and God of War among them. Another 24 titles sit at the minimum tier, including Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, Hogwarts Legacy and Alan Wake 2. Fifteen of the heaviest games — Starfield, Helldivers 2, Elden Ring, Fortnite, Counter-Strike 2 — ask for more CPU than the chip offers at minimum settings. These verdicts are CPU-only — the laptop's GPU and RAM decide actual playability.

Laptops that carry it

The 11-model roster is all business and workstation hardware from 2016–2017: Dell's Latitude 5480, 5490 and 5580, plus a deep Precision lineup (3520, 5520, 7520, 7720), HP's ZBook Studio G4, and Lenovo's ThinkPad T470p, P51 and P71. Listed prices run from $159 for a Latitude 5580 up to $532 for the 17-inch ThinkPad P71. Roster medians describe the fleet honestly: office comfort at 75 and a performance index of 40.4, against a gaming index of 30, a mobility index of 28 and a median discrete GPU score of just 18.4 — these were work machines, not gaming rigs.

Bottom line

The Core i7-7820HQ suits a buyer who wants cheap, well-built workstation or business-class hardware for office work and moderate multitasking. The processor still clears the recommended CPU tier for close to half the game catalog, but the laptops around it carry aging professional GPUs, so gaming results depend almost entirely on the specific machine's graphics. As a budget workhorse inside a $160–$530 Precision, ThinkPad P or ZBook, it remains a defensible pick.