Celeron N2840: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The Intel Celeron N2840 is a 2014-era entry-level processor from the Bay Trail generation, and 11 laptops in the catalog still carry it. It is an honest budget chip rather than a gaming or performance part: it meets the recommended CPU requirement in 0 of the 69 games the catalog tracks. This guide covers where it sits among laptop CPUs, what it brings, and which laptops carry it.

Where the Celeron N2840 sits in 2026

A catalog score of 0.34 places the chip 736th of 741 scored laptop CPUs — essentially the bottom of a table that spans two decades of silicon. The neighborhood is entirely legacy territory: the Core i3-3110M, Core i5-560M and Celeron N3060 sit just above, while the Celeron N2830, Celeron N2810 and Pentium G630 sit just below. Nothing in this range is competitive with modern processors; the comparison only tells you how these old chips rank among themselves.

What the chip brings

Bay Trail-M is a dual-core, dual-thread design on a 22 nm process, rated at just 7 W. It runs at 2.16 GHz base with a modest 2.58 GHz boost — clock speeds that explain the catalog score. Public benchmark numbers back the positioning: a Geekbench single-core score of 178, a multi-core score of 299, and a PassMark rating of 581. Those are fractions of what even a mid-range modern laptop CPU delivers, which is exactly what you would expect from a chip designed for cheap, fanless portables a decade ago.

Games: CPU-side readiness

Measured purely as a processor, the N2840 clears the recommended CPU tier for 0 of 69 cataloged games — and in fact it sits below the minimum CPU requirement for every single title on the list, from Cyberpunk 2077 down to Civilization 6 and Minecraft. Even the least demanding games in the catalog ask for more processor than this chip offers. These verdicts are CPU-only, but the conclusion is unambiguous regardless of GPU or RAM: this is not a chip for gaming in any form.

Laptops that carry it

The 11-model roster is a snapshot of the mid-2010s budget market: HP's Compaq 15 and 250 G3, Lenovo's IdeaPad 100-15IBY, B50-10, B50-30 and G50-30, HP's ChromeBook 14 G4, and Dell's Chromebook 11 and 3120. Where prices are listed they run from $89 to $135 — true entry-level money. Roster medians describe the fleet honestly: an energy efficiency index of 38.8 and a portability index of 31, but a gaming index of 23, a mobility index of 18 and an overall laptop score of just 10. These were cheap, light-duty machines when new, and time has not improved them.

Bottom line

The Celeron N2840 suits nobody who wants to game, edit media or multitask heavily in 2026 — the numbers leave no room for debate there. What it still represents is extremely cheap, low-power computing: web browsing, documents and basic school or office work on machines that often cost under $130. If you find one of these laptops at the right price and treat it as a typewriter with a screen, the chip will not surprise you. Anything beyond that calls for a newer generation.