Core i9-9880H vs. Core i7-8750H: A 56 percent performance boost from just two more cores

When Intel announced the 8th gen Core i9-8950HK last year, we were disappointed to find that its performance would be almost identical or even worse than the less expensive Core i7-8750H in some cases. Fortunately, the chipmaker has rectified this for the 9th gen Core i9-9880H by adding two more physical cores to better separate it from the Core i7-8750H and new Core i7-9750H.

Our first Core i9-9880H sample to land in our labs was the 2019 MSI GE75 9SG to replace the 2018 GE75 8SG. Since the only major difference between the two SKUs are the hexa-core i7-8750H and octa-core i9-9880H CPUs, this gives us an excellent opportunity to directly compare the two processors and see what kind of a performance gain the 9th gen Core i9-9880H can bring over the more common i7-8750H.

Our comparison chart below reveals that the i9-9880H is almost 60 percent faster than the average i7-8750H in our database taken from a sample size of 87 other laptops. This is faster than even the desktop Core i7-8700K by 25 to 30 percent. Single-thread performance according to Super Pi and CineBench, however, remains almost the same and so users will need to exploit all threads to get the most out of the i9-9880H.

Turbo Boost performance over time is also good albeit not perfect. Our CineBench R15 Multi-Thread loop test below shows a drop of almost 7 percent over time from 3.9 GHz to ~3.6 GHz. The GE75 9SG demands more power than the GE75 8SG as well by about 24 W when running Witcher 3.

Of course, the 56 percent boost in CPU performance translates to only marginal boosts when gaming. Running the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark (1080p Ultra) on the GE75 8SG returns an average frame rate of 99 FPS versus 109 FPS on the GE75 9SG to represent a 10 percent gain. From a gamer's perspective, don't expect any massive benefits over the i7-8750H since most modern titles are GPU bound.

See our dedicated page on the Core i9-9880H here for more technical details and benchmark comparisons and expect our GE75 9SG review to come in the next few days.