i7-9750H vs i5-9600K

Laptop gpu died a couple weeks ago and since I've been looking into some desktop builds namely a Micro ATX and Mini ITX build of either an i5-9400F, R5 3600, or i5-9600K. Differences coming down to price and desired performance. I've seen on gaming benchmarks that they're all fairly close to each other with productivity being dominated by the R5. Trying to budget the best possible and throwing in a halfway decent 1080p 75 hz monitor and a 1660 Ti I'm seeing costs roughly ranging from $1150-$1400 depending on cpu and cooling choice. I've noticed that some 9750H laptops with either a 1660 Ti or 2060 are in that price range or only slightly more expensive.

So my question is namely what is the performance difference between the 9750H and 9600K in gaming and productivity?

My understanding is the 9750H is 6 cores and 12 threads and all core turbo is 4GHz. So from what I know of the other three CPUs and the benchmarks I've seen, I'm assuming it's better than the 9400F since it all core turbos to 3.9 and has no multithreading. I'm assuming it's competitive with the stock 3600. And lastly for gaming I'm assuming it's not too far off from a stock or slightly overclocked 9600K but should win in multithreading productivity. Are these assumptions correct?

 

For what you'd spend on the parts for that type of desktop, including monitor and operating system, I would recommend picking up the Lenovo Legion Y545 laptop from Costco. Its specs are an i7 9750H, 16 GB of RAM, GTX 1660 Ti, 1080p 144 Hz IPS display, 512 GB NVMe SSD, and 1 TB hard drive. Even if you need to buy a Costco membership, it's only $60 so you're still coming out ahead, plus you can take advantage of all the other perks, including gas that typically $0.15-$0.50 cheaper than anywhere else.

 

It's tough to find gaming performance comparisons between mobile and desktop CPUs since the paired GPU is usually different. All the CPUs you mentioned are powerful enough that they won't significantly bottleneck a mid-range GPU like the GTX 1660 Ti or RTX 2060 for gaming. The AMD Ryzen 5 3600 and the Core i7-9750H support 12 threads versus six for the Core i5-9400/9600K, but whether that matters depends on your workload.

Charles