Core i7-8665U: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The Intel Core i7-8665U is a Whiskey Lake-U processor from 2018 — the refresh that closed out Intel's 8th-generation U-series in corporate laptops. The catalog matches it to 11 models, and it meets the recommended CPU requirement in 5 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 i7-8665U sits in 2026

A catalog score of 38.5 places the chip 330th of 672 scored laptop CPUs — the middle of a table that spans two decades of silicon. The neighborhood spans seven years of product lines: the Ryzen 5 PRO 3500U (39.1) and Core i3-1305U (38.7) just above, the Ryzen 5 3580U (38.5) alongside, and the Core i3-6098P, Core i5-6267U and Core i7-6660U (all 38.4) just below. A 2023 budget Core i3 outscoring a 2018 i7-branded part is the honest story of this tier: the badge buys efficiency and features, not headroom.

What the chip brings

Whiskey Lake-U is a 4-core, 8-thread design on a 14 nm process, rated at 15 W in its U-class configuration: a 1.9 GHz base clock and a 4.8 GHz maximum boost — the headline figure of the refresh. The integrated UHD Graphics 620 carries display duty. Memory support and cache details were not captured for this chip, so the table above sticks to what the catalog verifiably holds: 765 single-core and 2,425 multi-core in Geekbench, plus a PassMark overall score of 6,173.

Games: CPU-side readiness

Measured purely as a processor, the chip clears the recommended CPU tier for 5 of 69 cataloged games — Batman: Arkham Knight, Rainbow Six Siege, Mafia Definitive Edition, Rise of the Tomb Raider and Civilization 6. Grand Theft Auto V and Overwatch slip down to the minimum tier here, joining Cyberpunk 2077, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Red Dead Redemption 2, Minecraft, Valorant, Dota 2 and League of Legends — 44 titles in all sit at minimum. The remaining 20, from Fortnite and Elden Ring to Counter-Strike 2 and Starfield, ask for more processor than this. These verdicts are CPU-only — whether a game actually plays well depends on the laptop's GPU and RAM, and this fleet is an integrated-graphics one.

Laptops that carry it

The 11-model roster is uniformly ex-lease corporate hardware from 2017 through 2019: Dell Latitude 7300 at $183, 5400 at $199, 5500 and 7400 at $248 each, and the 7400 2-in-1 at $308; Lenovo ThinkPad L480 at $192, T490 at $219, P43s at $256 and X1 Yoga (4th gen) at $333; HP's Elite x2 G4 at $260 and ZBook 15u G6 at $309. Six business laptops, three convertibles and two mobile workstations, with nothing above $333. Roster medians describe the fleet: office comfort at 75, mobility at 60, portability at 69.5 and energy efficiency at 71.4 — comfortable work machines — while a gaming index of 23 and a median GPU score of 6.79 close the gaming conversation.

Bottom line

The Core i7-8665U is a corporate-fleet value buy: $183 to $333 on the used market for business-grade chassis whose office-comfort median of 75 says they were built for exactly this job. It is not a gaming or heavy-compute purchase — 5 recommended-tier titles out of 69 and integrated graphics throughout see to that. Buy one for the keyboard, the build and the price; look elsewhere for frame rates or sustained CPU load.