Intel Core Ultra 5 235HX Surprises with Big Gains Over Core i5 14500HX

Intel’s latest Arrow Lake-HX lineup is starting to shake up expectations in the high-performance laptop market. The spotlight right now is on the Intel Core Ultra 5 235HX, which recently appeared in PassMark benchmarks and made waves by outperforming its predecessor, the Core i5 14500HX, in both single-core and multi-core tests.

What’s most surprising is that this uplift comes despite Intel stripping away hyper-threading from the new design – a bold move that seems to have paid off.

The Core Ultra 5 235HX packs 14 cores with turbo frequencies reaching up to 5.1 GHz on performance cores and 4.5 GHz on efficiency cores. Its base TDP remains a familiar 55W, but turbo power climbs to 160W, slightly higher than the Core i5 14500HX it replaces. Even with these modest power adjustments, the results are anything but modest: the 235HX scored 4,708 points in single-core and 40,122 points in multi-core benchmarks

. That translates to around 30% faster single-threaded performance and an eye-opening 38% faster multi-threaded performance compared to the 14500HX, which still had hyper-threading enabled.

In generational terms, this is the kind of performance jump that Intel fans have been waiting for. It positions the Core Ultra 5 235HX not just as a solid upgrade over the 14500HX, but as a genuine competitor to higher-tier chips. Against the Core i7 14700HX, a 20-core, 28-thread processor, the new Ultra 5 punches above its weight with 18% higher single-core scores and only 7% lower multi-core performance. Perhaps even more striking is how it stacks against the Core i9 14900HX: the 235HX actually beats it by 11% in single-core workloads, while trailing only 11% in multi-core tasks. For a midrange SKU, those are astonishing numbers.

The comparisons don’t end there. On the AMD side, Intel’s new budget-friendly powerhouse also edges ahead of Ryzen 7 9800X3D and Ryzen 9 9955HX3D in single-core testing, with a noticeable 6% lead. That said, it’s worth stressing that gaming results are a different story. AMD’s 9000-series X3D chips, with their massive cache advantage, still dominate gaming scenarios. Yet, in raw productivity tasks and synthetic benchmarks, Intel’s new HX chip shows remarkable promise.

What this means in practice is that laptops powered by the Core Ultra 5 235HX could deliver workstation-class performance for creators, developers, and professionals who rely on strong single-thread speeds as much as multi-core muscle. It also demonstrates that Intel’s Arrow Lake-HX family is finally bringing meaningful architectural improvements to mobile platforms, even as the desktop Arrow Lake lineup struggled to impress. If these early numbers hold true in real-world usage, Intel may have just delivered one of the most balanced and competitive laptop CPUs in recent years.

The big caveat, of course, is that synthetic benchmarks don’t always translate to real-world dominance. Thermal design, laptop chassis limitations, and power delivery all play crucial roles. But on paper, the Core Ultra 5 235HX sets a new bar for midrange mobile processors, narrowing the gap to premium SKUs like the Core Ultra 9 275HX while keeping pricing (hopefully) more reasonable. For users who value high performance in a portable form factor, this chip could become one of the standout options in 2025’s premium laptop market.