It all depends on how you define "reasonable" bitrate. I am running ~40mbit h265 videos. I have a Pentium G4400 which can only do a few frames per second and I

It all depends on how you define "reasonable" bitrate. I am running ~40mbit h265 videos. I have a Pentium G4400 which can only do a few frames per second and I have tested on an i5 also and it still drops frames on high complexity scenes. More to the point, why would I want to burn 100 watts decoding this in software when I can do it in single digits with fixed function hardware? [edit] You may be talking about videos that can use Intel's own fixed function video decoding hardware, which will work just fine on an i3. I am talking about 10bit h265 which Intel Skylake didn't support when I was building my system. Kaby Lake supports it now so if you are building a new system Kaby Lake would be the way to go.