Core Ultra 5 135H: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The Intel Core Ultra 5 135H is the value rung of the first Core Ultra generation — a Meteor Lake-H design from 2023 with 14 cores behind a 28 W envelope, carried by 33 models in the catalog. It meets the recommended CPU requirement in 47 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 Ultra 5 135H sits in 2026

A catalog score of 56 places the chip 208th of 741 scored laptop CPUs — the upper third of a table that spans two decades of silicon. The Pentium Gold G7400T (56.2), Core i7-8557U (56.2) and Ryzen 5 8645HS (56.1) sit just above; the Core i5-13500H (55.1), Core Ultra 7 365 (55.1) and Core i5-12600H (54.8) just below. Outranking two mainline H-class i5s by a full point is the practical story — this 28 W part places ahead of bigger-numbered 13th- and 12th-generation H-series silicon on the same table.

What the chip brings

Meteor Lake-H is a 14-core, 18-thread design on a 7 nm-class process, rated at 28 W in its H-class configuration: a 3.6 GHz base clock and up to 4.6 GHz boost. The integrated graphics tile here is the 4-core Arc iGPU, the compact configuration of Intel's first Arc-branded mobile graphics — enough for display work and light gaming on machines without a discrete GPU. Memory support and cache details were not captured for this chip, so the table above sticks to what the catalog verifiably holds: a PassMark overall score of 22,000.

Games: CPU-side readiness

Measured purely as a processor, the chip clears the recommended CPU tier for 47 of 69 cataloged games — from Black Myth Wukong, Ghost of Tsushima, Returnal, Metro Exodus and PUBG through Dying Light 2, Diablo 4, Doom Eternal, Death Stranding, God of War and Grand Theft Auto V down to Civilization 6. Another 20 sit at the minimum tier: Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, Fortnite, Counter-Strike 2 and Alan Wake 2 all list the chip above their minimum but below their recommended CPU requirement. Only Starfield and Helldivers 2 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 roster leans heavily on the 4-core Arc tile rather than discrete graphics.

Laptops that carry it

The 33-model roster spans 2024–2025 and climbs a clear price ladder. The Dell Latitude 7450 at $519 is the budget door in; HP's EliteBook 840 G11 and ProBook 440 G11 at $1,007 and Lenovo's ThinkPad E14 Gen 7, E16 Gen 3 and T14 Gen 5 at $1,144 form the business core. The workstation tier is deep: Dell Precision 5490 and 5690 plus HP's ZBook Firefly 14 G11, Studio 16 G11 and Power 16 G11 all at $1,408, topped by the ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 at $1,760. Roster medians describe the fleet honestly: office comfort at a perfect 100, energy efficiency 91.8, mobility 70.5 — but a gaming index of 23 on a median best GPU score of zero, because most of these machines ship integrated-only.

Bottom line

The Core Ultra 5 135H suits the buyer who wants modern Core Ultra efficiency with genuine CPU headroom: recommended-tier coverage for over two-thirds of the tracked game catalog, a roster that runs from a $519 Latitude to $1,760 workstations, and flawless office comfort throughout. The honest caveat is graphics — the fleet's median best GPU score is zero, so treat gaming as a per-listing question about the discrete GPU, not the processor, which rarely limits anything short of Starfield and Helldivers 2.