Core i7-9750H: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The Intel Core i7-9750H was the six-core staple of 2019 gaming laptops — a Coffee Lake refresh that held the mainstream H-class slot for two full years. The catalog matches it to 19 models, and it meets the recommended CPU requirement in 49 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 i7-9750H sits in 2026

A catalog score of 58.9 places the chip 178th of 672 scored laptop CPUs — the upper third of a table that spans two decades of silicon. The neighborhood is squarely mid-table: the Core i7-13800H (59.2), Core i7-13700H (59) and Core Ultra 7 165H (58.9) just above, the Core i5-1145G7 (58.8), Ryzen 5 5500H (58.5) and Ryzen 3 5425U (58.5) just below. A 2019 six-core sandwiched between newer fourteen-core parts and thin-and-light silicon is the clearest picture of how compressed this stretch of the table is — several years of progress separated by fractions of a point.

What the chip brings

Coffee Lake-HR is a 6-core, 12-thread design built on a 14 nm process and rated at 45 W in its H-class configuration: a 2.6 GHz base clock and up to 4.5 GHz boost. Memory support runs to 128 GB of DDR4 across two channels with 41 GB/s of bandwidth, and the integrated UHD 630 handles light display duty when no discrete GPU is present. In public benchmarks the chip posts 1,359 single-core and 4,976 multi-core in Geekbench, with a PassMark overall score of 10,578.

Games: CPU-side readiness

Measured purely as a processor, the chip clears the recommended CPU tier for 49 of 69 cataloged games — including Counter-Strike 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Black Myth Wukong, Returnal, God of War, Metro Exodus, Doom Eternal and Diablo 4. Another 18 sit at the minimum tier: Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring, Fortnite, Hogwarts Legacy, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Apex Legends 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 with 2019-era graphics the GPU is usually the first limit.

Laptops that carry it

The 19-model roster splits between 2019 originals and lingering 2021-2022 inventory. The Acer Nitro 5 family holds four of the twelve displayed slots: AN517-41 and AN517-54 at $590 from 2021, AN517-42 and AN517-55 at $737 from 2022. Dell's 2019 line covers the rest — XPS 15 7590 at $499, XPS 7590 at $590, G5 5590 at $519, Vostro 7590 at $426, the Latitude 5401 business machine at $291, and the Precision workstations 5540 at $398 and 7540 at $447. HP's Pavilion 15-dk0046nr at $519 rounds it out. Roster medians describe the fleet honestly: office comfort at 95, a gaming index of 57 and a performance index of 65 reflect capable-but-dated discrete graphics, while mobility at 22 and portability at 25 say these are chunky mainstream chassis rather than ultrabooks.

Bottom line

The Core i7-9750H is the pragmatist's used-gaming pick among 2019 chips: an upper-third rank in 2026, recommended-tier CPU readiness for 49 of 69 tracked games, and a roster of $291-$737 machines. It meets the minimum CPU mark on nearly everything else, so the processor rarely disqualifies a listing — the GPU, battery and chassis condition decide these buys. Buyers chasing the newest CPU-heavy titles should step up a tier; everyone else gets a proven six-core for budget money.