Core i7-8850H: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The Intel Core i7-8850H was the six-core workhorse of Intel's 8th-generation Coffee Lake line — a 2018 mobile processor that shipped in professional workstations and premium business machines. The catalog matches it to 12 models, and 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 i7-8850H sits in 2026

A catalog score of 57.6 places the chip 209th of 737 scored laptop CPUs — the upper third of a table that spans two decades of silicon. The neighborhood spans eras freely: the Ryzen 3 7330U (57.8), Ryzen 5 PRO 4650U (57.7) and Core 7 240H (57.7) just above, the Xeon E3-1575M v5 (57.5) and Core i5-14450HX (57.5) alongside, and the Core i7-8559U (57.4) just below. Ranking level with the Core i5-14450HX — a far newer part — is the practical story: six Coffee Lake cores aged into the modern mid-pack.

What the chip brings

Coffee Lake-H is a 6-core, 12-thread design on a 14 nm process, rated at 45 W in its H-class configuration: a 2.6 GHz base clock and up to 4.3 GHz boost. Memory support is captured in full: DDR4 on two channels, up to 64 GB, with 42 GB/s of bandwidth — a pro-grade ceiling for its year. The integrated UHD 630 is display-duty hardware, and in public benchmarks the chip posts 1,344 single-core and 4,721 multi-core in Geekbench with a PassMark overall score of 10,040.

Games: CPU-side readiness

Measured purely as a processor, the chip clears the recommended CPU tier for 47 of 69 cataloged games — Metro Exodus, PUBG, Returnal, Black Myth Wukong, Ghost of Tsushima, Dying Light 2, God of War and Grand Theft Auto V among them. Another 20 sit at the minimum tier: Call of Duty: Warzone, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, Fortnite, Cyberpunk 2077 and Counter-Strike 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 the professional machines in this roster carry pro-grade graphics rather than gaming GPUs.

Laptops that carry it

The 12-model roster is a 2018 snapshot of the professional tier: Dell Precision 3530, 5530, 7530 and 7730 workstations from $326 to $495, HP's ZBook Studio G5, 15 G5 and 17 G5 from $325 to $392, and Lenovo's ThinkPad P52 and P72 at $475 and $462, plus the Latitude 5491 and 5591 and EliteBook 1050 G1 on the business side from $278 to $434. Roster medians describe the fleet honestly: office comfort at 95 and a photo and design index of 81.5, but a gaming index of 39.5 with a best-GPU median of 37.3 — these are workstation graphics, not gaming rigs.

Bottom line

The Core i7-8850H remains a genuinely capable processor in a cheap 2018 chassis: nearly the whole tracked game catalog is reachable at minimum-to-recommended CPU settings, and six cores still hold up for office, development and light creation work. The catch is the graphics — every laptop in this roster carries a workstation GPU, so gaming value depends entirely on the chip paired alongside it. It suits a buyer who wants inexpensive CPU muscle for work, with gaming as a secondary concern.