MSI CLAW Hands On First Look! Is This New 16 Core Handheld Faster Than The Rest? 

WOnking on the 135H Video Now, Is There anything you want to see running on the CLAW?

You know it's bad when eta prime complains about the performance

I think the correct terms are "intel paid MSI to use its inefficient CPU in a handheld"

Just another example of how amazing the chip in the Steam Deck is.

Makes sense on why they didn’t send a review unit. It will be reviewed badly definitely.

You needed 65w to match the Z1E at 30w? 😳🤯

So ROG Ally gets better performance at lower wattages, has a VRR display, and is cheaper. Can anyone name a single reason for the MSI Claw to even exist?

These reviews just make me love my Deck more and more.

Pretty much DoA with an Intel chip that is more expensive than offerings with the much better Z1 Extreme. And this isn't even including the power consumption. IIRC the Z1 Extreme's max cTDP is basically the same as the BASE of the Intel 155H.

its way too expensive for the performance you get , the rog ally out performs it and is cheaper

Just recently got it checked in the stores, love the response of the joystick so much! and the chassis as well, it completely fits my hand.

I was waiting to see what intel 155 was going to bring. Now ill wait for the rog ally 2.

Hey ETA, I'd really suggest to take a deeper look at the feel and function of the LB and RB Buttons ;) Cheers!

Nice review about the product. will definitely buy the MSI CLAW soon!

Rog ally on sale at Best Buy rn!!! 399$ 😂 over the 699-799$ claw

I'm getting one soon. It looks awesome 🎉😁😁

I played with it in a store and the bottoms at the back are quite sensitive, good for intense gaming! I had that problem with the ASUS ROG Ally and i'm glad MSI doesn't have this problem with the Claw. Nice work!

Great review! I'm eagerly anticipating the battery life test results, especially since the Claw is touted as the best among all handheld devices.

The MSI looks design-wise like a Rog Ally copy

Just try it in store yesterday. The design is good, easy to handle and fit my palm.

Why they bothered releasing this is odd. Intel is AT LEAST two years away from a a fabrication roadmap to make chips even semi close to AMD. Intel execs were lazy and milking older tech to maximize their bonuses, since less capital spend and waiting for the ROI. Long lag time to catch up now.

Got a chance to try in the store days ago, it feels pretty good more than I expected actually

I definitely enjoy your handheld videos. I feel like you tell it like it is

OMGG!!! Iuv the black one😍😍 Looks so convenient to carry it anywhere. When can I get one???

I can't wait to see you run emulations on this in a few months. Once it get more updates. Thanks for another great video as always :)

This looks awesome!!! Finally a handheld console with good battery life and feel.

already got one and for me i really like the comfortable design and big battery life

game pictures on screen looks awesome

I'd like to see performance with the E cores disabled and maybe hyperthreading disabled as well. Maybe those P cores will be able to get max clocks while the gpu does as well

Great video & review, good performance

just got my claw few days ago, the gaming experience is beyond my imagination !!

I don't think its as good as the rog ally or levono legion go because more cores does not mean more performance but i like that it has hall effect

I just got one and it runs smoothly though, the design handling experience is amazing btw

The Interior looks clean. I would have assumed that by that design it should have more power.

Nice piece of Kit 😎

The screen looks pretty good with vibrant colors! 🤩

The claw do have better shape than others! The angle is so perfect in shape!!!

This is an amazing products and highly recommended to use for those who love gaming ❤❤❤

just tried and enjoy the feeling when holding it, ergonomically comfortable, good to take it everywhere.

This is definitely a game changer for handheld gaming! The ergonomic design is super comfy, and with 10 hours of battery life, I can finally marathon those RPGs without my hands cramping or needing to recharge every few hours.

That is insane that feels like less than a decade ago, Der Bauer was breaking the 5GHz record with his crazy liquid cooling technique and now laptop processors are just casually almost hitting 5GHz.

i want to know about the controls. how the buttons feel besides the Dpad. the amount of throw the triggers have? are they curving in at an angle? the bumpers depth press? how they feel pressing them. do they feel cheap? or premium? how does it compare to deck or the xbox elite series 2 controller? i can say for sure the OXP2 controller is ass and i am looking for a new handheld to be my Daily driver. im looking to buy the steam deck OLED and i love how the steam decks feel and layout and IMO is superior compared to OXP2

I'll wait till they improve it. The screen is nice though for 1080p. Does OLED Steam Deck have a 1080p screen or is it 720p?

I bought this and it’s amazing

Did you use the latest iGPU driver from intel? The one from MSI seems outdated.

makes the ally look so good. i play helldivers at 1080 quality upscaling and get 40+fps with vrr and its very playable.

Nope. Intel paid stupid money to get their chips into this handheld and tried to rush to get market share and it shows. Nice try MSI with copying Asus ROG Ally but this thing is already a flop and once Ally 2 comes out, this will be just a fleeting memory. AMD is still the king for handheld PC gaming.

Great machine!

More than likely, this device with an eGPU through Thunderbolt 4 is where we'll probably see this thing shine over something like ROG Ally using the XG Mobile. Core parking will become a must in these Intel chips

The chassis looks really great for real.

The new Rog Ally color is looking fire. 🔥

Your ROG Ally has Varibright enabled, that's why the display looks a little washed out when running on battery.

I had high hopes for it but watching some reviews the performance is an issue and the price is too high, gonna wait a bit longer for a new handheld, since I would really love one with WiFi 7

They shouldn't have let ETA Prime buy this with his own money 😅🤷🏽‍♂️ Homie didn't hold back 🫡

Awesome!

have you opened it up? Would like to see how Easy/Hard a 2TB 2230 SSD upgrade would be. Ah, its near the end of the video.

Does the MSI Claw have a six-axis gyro? I couldn't find any mention of a gyro in MSI's technical specifications. Both the Steam Deck, ASUS Rog Ally and Legion Go all have gyros, and for me, that is an essential requirement for any modern pc gaming handheld.

Battery is always the first thing I would consider for handheld, the MSI Claw looks good for me as the first handheld to get.

The Display is good and also the Mystic light.

One thing i don't see people mention alot is the Port is thunderbolt 4 right? Making it much easier to have a compatible external GPU than ROG Ally , as much as i love ROG , Getting a XG mobile is hard and really expensive where i live, while external GPUs with thunderbolt3 are really common.

finally! i've been eyeing on this for quite sometime! The ergo-gaming appears to be rather comfortable

More PC handhelds are always a good thing. I am looking for one into my PC life.

MSI Claw is better than ever, the ergonomic design let my hand feel good. I like TB4 to extend my screen~~🤩

Sorry If I am asking ahead of time but didn't even bother comparing the Lenovo GO, is it that bad? or Should I finish watching the video?

I just wanna know where i can find that live MSI wallpaper you got 😅

Can’t wait for the z1 extreme comparisons. 16 core sounds nice on paper, but this is almost purely a gaming machine, and the 780m is hard to beat as an apu.

Looks okay but for the price it's DOA. I can just get a brand new rog ally for cheaper and get better performance.

bought a rog ally 3 days ago for $500 (the z1xtreme version). Is it better than the claw or nah ?

The reason for the viewing angles is because the ally has an anti-glare coating on its screen.

It will have to be another year until they make all the bios and drivers tweaks. Was the same with rog ally in start

Wait for the oled version😊

currently i am looking for a handheld device with longer battery life and cool design. i think MSI Claw is my prioirty right now. 😍

You have the OLED 1TB with the screen that kills blacks and contrast. That is why I prefer the Glossy one.

i feel like this should be the same prise as the z1 ally and not 50$ over the extreme.

My biggest question is the specs the i5 still has the same GPU spec 8 cores. What's the frequency difference? Because the I-5 to i7 may not make that big of a difference. If it has the exact same GPU information. I know like the Z1 versus Z1 extreme the Z1 has 4 GPU cores. The Z1 extreme has 12 GPU cores

Screw seal in the back broke it and say goodbye to the warranty and to swap ssd still need to take off the heat sink lmao

Steam Deck has officially become my favorite gaming device of all-time and arguably a top 5 purchase ever for me after owning it a month. I’ll have it over my modded PS Vita which I’ve owned for nearly 7 years. With all that said, I do have problems with it almost daily. Sometimes it crashes because of an update. Or maybe the keyboard won’t pop up. Yet, I can accept all of it because I only got it for $250 and it’s the 512 LCD. I got it for the same price as a used Switch OLED. *Final* *Fantasy* *VII* *Remake* 😔 So I finally played Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade yesterday since Steam’s Spring Sale is currently going on. Got it for $35. I had to tweak it exactly like Pixel Deck’s setup with the dynamic resolution disabler, forcing DX11, and it’s generally buttery smooth unless you’re at Wall Market and you see tons of NPCs. Then maybe a small stutter or when you enter a new area. I can live with all that. But NGL, I’m not sure how to feel about FF7R as an actual game. The gameplay is awful so far. The fights can drag and drag. Took me like over 20 minutes to kill that giant robo scorpion in the beginning and I had to use nearly all my potions. You can’t just spam the X button. I’m hoping it does get better and I’m hearing it does after the 5-hour mark since my party starts out very weak. But my other major complaint is how slow the pacing is. I feel a little duped. FF7R does feel like tons of padding with useless sidequests very similar to Shenmue III. There’s this one part in FF7R where Cloud has to go to the train station after the reactor blew up. I’m just wandering around looking for stairs. Each section, there are always vehicles blocking my path. In my head, I’m like why can’t Cloud just hop over them? Why do I need to go around the block each time the vehicles are there? I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be that great once they decided to go Kingdom Hearts with it since Nomura created that. I prefer more of my turn-based JRPGs. I would’ve been happy if they copied exactly like Final Fantasy X’s with the tag out feature but maintain the Materia system. I believe FFX was the last great FF game until it went downhill once Square and Enix merged in 2003. Now I don’t know who I’m controlling in FF7R and watching my other party members attack while I’m not controlling them and they’re getting hit. FF7R feels more like an interactive Advent Children movie and I rewatched FF7AC last night and it’s lame like it was back in 2005. The story, characters, and dialogue are so bland and boring. OG FF7 made me laugh several times. Perhaps from the bad translation but I laughed from it several times and I beat it 4x. I enjoy when Yuffie pumps her arms or what an abuser Cid is. I feel FF7R is becoming a chore to play. We have this great tech but it seems the content hasn’t been great for the last decade or so. Not that the OG FF7 didn’t have flaws. It clearly did. The characters had hooves, no nose, and barely had a mouth. That game was very grindy. I spent hours and hours to level up my party to have a fighting chance against Ruby and Emerald Weapon. And maybe wearing my nostalgia glasses can be biased since I was 16 when I first played that. It was amazing for it’s time. But even if I didn’t wear them, I still feel it plays better. I’m more engaged to the OG’s story and pacing. The music hit harder on me while this new one feels more subtle as if they toned the volume and equalizer down. The later FF7 entries like Crisis Core and the Advent Children movie started to feel less like FF7 to me. I feel FF7R is a different game more in line with Crisis Core but simply using the characters and core story from the OG FF7. I guess I prefer my turn-based FF games. I can strategize before the fight like a chess match. I’ll plan which attack moves I’ll use before every big boss fight. With FF7R, it’s no different than Kingdom Hearts and the last FF games dating back to FF13. Right now in FF7R, I’m in the motorcycle fight and I find it a chore to beat. I’ve already died 4x. The dude I’m fighting sounds stereotypical annoying. Maybe I should’ve picked easy before playing because I constantly lose even basic fights. Normal difficulty feels like hard and they made it more difficult to pad the playing time some more. When I fight, all I do is press X button and then look at my menu to use potions and hi-potions for my character because I can be low in HP after two big hits against giant rats. I was going to buy Red Dead Redemption II and God of War (2018) but I decided not to waste another $45. I only picked up FF7R and Uncharted 4. I keep reading that RDR2 is boring af. Great from a technical standpoint with a great story but very slow and boring. Probably how I felt playing Breath of the Wild. And GOW18 looks boring and repetitive. I don’t want to talk to Kratos’ son all the time and keep calling him, “Boy.” I feel the first three on PS2/PS3 was peak GOW before they rebooted it to Norse mythology. I want the boobies back! The reason why I still enjoy my Steam Deck so much is while some of the AAA titles have been disappointing and don’t really care for open world environments with tons of running around in a town or on horseback going around fields, I do love that it can emulate PS2, GameCube, and Wii so well. The Wii was the one I ignored the most when emulating on my Galaxy Flip3 back in 2021. But I now found more games to play for it than for GameCube. I can argue GameCube and Wii combined have more fun games to play than Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 combined and the latter two were 2 of my top 3 favs. With Shenmue III and Final Fantasy VII Remake coming off a bit disappointing, I appreciate Gen 6 so much more now even with their worse graphics. No DLCs or micro-transactions. Plenty of great one-player games. And while Wii is considered part of Gen 7, it’s really Gen 6 hardware with motion controls. Wii emulation is especially great on Steam Deck thanks to the trackpads acting like a mousepad when you want to point at something. I couldn’t emulate this on my Flip3 using the touchscreen or a regular Bluetooth game controller. It’s now safe to say the OG FF7 will remain my favorite game of all-time followed by Shenmue II (Xbox version since I prefer it with English dub and it loads faster). While Shenmue III and FF7R will not make my top 30. That’s heartbreaking when I was so excited for them back in E3 2015. People should watch the RU-vid reaction when FF7R and Shenmue III were announced. People went bonkers. But it became similar to Star Wars: Episode I and II. Decades of anticipation only to feel let down. The Gen 7 and up games mostly blows. Prettier graphics but becoming a chore and a bore to play. Even Metal Gear Solid V disappointed me once they went the GTA route. I know people love Rockstar but I don’t. Ever since Grand Auto Theft III won Game of the Year awards and people were praising their open world approach and that franchise, I felt that’s when gaming started to go downhill. So PS5 might be saved by GTA6? Good luck with that. Rockstar makes great open world games and even interactive movie games but I don’t find them fun to play at all. It’s games like GTA and Horizon that puts me to sleep. And no thanks to Elden Ring. Tired of wandering around on horseback looking for something to do or doing some meaningless fetch quest to pad the playing time. I prefer games to be linear coming from the NES generation. I’ll stick to Nintendo. Simpler. More fun. Don’t have to look at tons of menu pages to figure out how to play the game. As much as I sometimes hate Nintendo for being these greedy bastards, they do have the most replayable libraries. I’ll be keeping my Steam Deck strictly for the PS2/GameCube/Wii emulation and the occasional AAA title once ported for PC. I could care less if I can never emulate Xbox 360 and PS3 on it because I find their libraries boring. My favorite AAA game on my Steam Deck so far is 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag which I bought for my Switch Lite back in October 2022. That game can also feel redundant but it holds my attention longer from the gameplay and the Caribbean scenery is beautiful. Favorite Dedicated Gaming Devices 1. Steam Deck 2. PS Vita 3. Switch Lite 4. PSP 5. PlayStation 6. Dreamcast 7. PlayStation 2 8. Super NES 9. GameCube 10. Genesis 11. NES 12. Wii Favorite Video Games 1. Final Fantasy VII 2. Shenmue II 3. Tekken 3 4. NBA Street Vol. 2 5. Super Mario World 6. Ridge Racer (PSP) 7. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe 8. Mario Kart: Double Dash!! 9. Street Fighter II: SCE (Genesis) 10. Super Street Fighter II (MAME) 11. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 12. Final Fantasy X I can could afford a ROG Ally as many go for under $400 in OfferUp and it’s the Z1 Extreme version. It’s arguably the most returned device at Best Buy. But I hate Asus and Windows. I also don’t care for most modern games since Gen 7, so if my Deck can’t emulate PS3 games like Ally could because of its aging Zen 2/RDNA 2, I don’t care. And many of these Windows PC handhelds will get replaced every year. Steam Deck is all the power I ever need as long as it emulates PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Wii really well and it does.

Battery life and ergonomic design are the most important thing when i'm considering to buy a gaming handheld. Personally, MSI Claw is the most confortable handheld in the market now.

Oled should be standard for all handheld devices. A PS5 style dpad would be nice, too. We’ll see down the road if this is worth buying.

holup, i keep hearing comparations between the big dogs on the market except lenovo. is lenovo legion handheld that bad? im confused and dont know what to buy as portable device so im sticking to buying a laptop if is not clear wich is great or acceptable. i hate the apu thing & the oveprice egpu avability is terible for avarage consumer and a laptop feels x10 better then potato held

Starfield can be pretty demanding especially when you crank the settings and try a stress test

The hands-on experience on claw is pretty great! Compared to ROG Ally, I prefer buying claw especially for the design and performance

im curious how's the fan noise vs the legion

Had a chance to test it myself at IEM Katowice 2024 over Intel Expo place and i have to say it this is really great start from Intel but MSI went total AWOL with the price...

Maybe it'll improve over time with updates 🤷‍♂️ Intel GPU's have improved greatly since they released their driver updates. Maybe this will be the same?

i actually love the software, it looks like a console

Atlast in right direction

it looks so much like an rog ally... I wonder if any of the parts can fit in one another like the dpad, sticks or battery

So excited to see new player coming! I think what matters as a handheld is its comfortable hand-on experience and the long battery life which MSI Claw seems can satisfy me. And, nice appearance is a plus!

It's a good thing in some way, competition. How amd pushed intel and nvidia and now we have great products 👌. But for gaming handhelds, 16 cores? I don't know the layout of ultra 7 but that's a bit much no? It needs to surpass the expectations of gaming on the go, make the battery last. Doesn't need to be desktop in performance. Just right and efficient. Can't complain about the deck, limiting fps, voltage offset plus 11 to 13 on the tdp. And i don't have to stay hyper focus on battery levels. Like how u feel with a 3ds or switch.

Hitting almost 90'C at times probably isn't helping and willing to bet similar SD card issues on this because the placement is exactly the same as an ROG Ally but this seems to run much hotter if I'm not mistaken.

I wonder if the ai has anything to do with that high cpu load is there any way to turn it off

the MSI claw really is a pile of trash, it has the worst energy efficiency of any handheld ive used. why on earth you'd put an intel chip inside one of these is beyond me.

Serious question, claw or the rog ally? And why?

To me MSI Claw still has the best looking among all handhelds in the market. Just love that ergonomic thick grip feeling that allows me to play for hours without feeling tired.

Why would viewing angles matter on something you’re gonna hold directly in front of your face.

Each handheld has its unique selling point, Steam Deck has its OS, Ally has its interface, Legion go has its amazing huge screen, the Claw honestly has nothing but a polished version of all other handhelds. It's an ROG ally in black.

Could driver updates tighten the gap in performance between this and the Ally?

My friend got one already. He said everything is all good, especially he can play OTG for a long time due to the big battery. I'm going to get mine soon!

Someone could give this guy a handheld pc with a celeron and he woild recommend it