The AMD Ryzen 5 7535HS and Intel Core i5-12500H are two of the most popular CPUs in most budget gaming laptops found today. The notebooks with these processors are priced close to each other but are vastly different from a technological point of view. They have different core counts, cache sizes, integrated GPUs, and more. The two processors are also based on two completely different architectures.
Which is the best laptop CPU for gaming? This article goes into an in-depth comparison between the two processors to find which is the best for gaming.
Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and solely reflect the writer's opinions.
AMD Ryzen 5 7535HS vs Intel Core i5-12500H
The AMD Ryzen 5 7535HS is based on the Zen 3+ architecture designed for laptops and has better power efficiency than the standard Zen 3. On the other hand, the Core i5-12500H is based on the Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake architecture that brought a significant performance boost compared to its 11th geb CPUs.
All that said, before we check how the two processors perform in gaming, let's look at their specs first.
Specs comparison
The Ryzen 5 7535HS has six cores, but the Intel Core i5-12500H has double the cores, thanks to its use of P and E-cores. Here are the full specs of the two CPUs:
The major difference between the two CPUs is their architecture, core counts, and the type of cores they have. The Intel Core i5-12500H has a hybrid core architecture of P and E-cores, where the P-cores are performance cores and E-cores are for efficiency.
Intel's core architecture may look unnecessarily complicated, but it's all handled in the background by the company's Thread Director, which is built into Windows 11.
On the other hand, the AMD Ryzen 5 7535HS has the good old standard core architecture, and there's no hybridization underneath.
Performance benchmarks
The specs don't always translate to real-world performance, so let's check out some popular benchmarks, such as Cinebench, PassMark, and more, for the two laptop CPUs:
In single-core benchmarks, the Intel Core i5-12500H is 10% faster on average than the other, while it is 19% faster on average in multi-core benchmarks. So, the Intel processor has a decent lead in CPU performance over the Ryzen, which also affects the gaming performance.
The single-core performance usually leans heavily into gaming benchmarks as well. So, expect the Intel Core i5-12500H to provide 10% higher performance over the Ryzen 5 7535HS, so long as the two laptops have the same GPU, RAM speed, RAM capacity, and a similar thermal system.
Price
Notebooks with both processors are priced close to each other as long as the system configurations are similar. Any notebook with these processes will have a budget price tag, so there's no need to worry about the pricing.
Which is the best laptop CPU for gaming?
The Core i5-12500H is the faster CPU and the benchmarking tests prove it. The Intel processor scored consistently higher points in every benchmark, including Cinebench, Geekbench, and even PassMark, compared to the Ryzen processor.
That said, since laptops with different CPUs don't have the same voltage tuning and cooling system, the actual gaming performance could be higher on the Intel or just the same. Even the RAM speed could influence the performance. There are too many factors in a notebook, hence the gaming performance can vary.