Worse Than I Expected - MSI Claw In-Depth Review 

That transition from thumbnail to video was truly amazing

''Hello everyone I am the Phawx and today I am dissapointed''

As i've said before, this should have been called "MSI Flaw".

Oh boy! Those first 5 seconds alone got me mentally prepared for what is about to unfold!

this guy is way more thorough than eta prime he should have more subs

Intel must be paying a good chunk of money for handheld companies to partner with them despite already knowing how good the amd chips are

Poor Russ took this thing on his trip to Japan

Curious how many other youtubers 'break down' this handheld but neglect to go this far into it. Well done.

Late to game and not cheap enough... wtf is Intel thinking?

Finally something that i can skip! Tired of some RU-vidrs recomend every single gadget. Some be like : "i am a huge fan of ..." thanks for the video!

I love the way it transitions from thumbnail to video

A handheld that basically needs to be plugged in at all times really sucks. What a bummer.

My personal oppinion is MSI had NO interest entering into the handheld market but intel probably gave them a ton of money to make a handheld with intel chips inside to take on the marketshare with AMD. That explains why the claw resembles the ROG Ally so much, Someone on Reddit was able to find purchase orders where it appears MSI bought parts from ASUS or the company that makes the components for ASUS. If MSI took this serious they could of had a killer device on their hand, instead they just released a sub par product. And for the people that said the Steam Deck, ROG Ally and Legion go all had issues when they first launched, yes you are correct they did however MSI also had almost a year since the ROG Ally launched to be able to get things tweaked and working properly. One would expect the claw should at least be on par with the current handhelds not this far behind.

This is what RU-vid needs more. Good informative high quality videos with a nice presentation. Thank you for your work, im always happy to see a video of yours.

The king talked.

Great intro from the thumbnail. I dont think ive ever seen anyone do that in all the years ive watched youtube. Well done and subbed

Wow, that 50 minutes FLEW by. That's a good thing! To me and my brain that means you didn't doddle or wafer too much on a single thing. You didn't beat any dead horses, you stuck to the point, and changed topics and talking points perfectly. This is what I would call a gold standard on a deep dive review; not too long, not too short, and never did I feel the need to CMD-Tab over to something else.

Been waiting for this! I've seen so many other reviews and I could tell the reviewer was trying their hardest to not totally say it was garbage. I've been waiting for yours because you tell the brutal truths we need! Keep up the good work!

This key combo was known back on the old MSIbooks on notebookreview, back in 2016! Amazing that it's still there. It's basically the AMI menus that are locked out. But some options don't do anything. Also, the VRM "trip" current limit (hard shutdown), sometimes linked to SKU ICCMAX, can't be controlled by hidden advanced menus, as this is hardware specific and has to be enabled as an option by MSI directly.

I love that transition from thumbnail to video you're doing. You're probably the first one I watched who did that. Keep that up!

Lol, i love ur thumbnail to video transitions Carey. Now i see why u werent in the nerdnest podcast yesterday lol.😂

You know it’s bad when the phawx hates it. Just get a deck or an ally (sale) EDIT: Oops forgot the legion go

Im soo glad you did this video! Cause I know you don't mess around and tells it how it really is! Great job on the video!

Was so waiting for @ThePhawx 's review on this. Got to make some time for watching it

That intro trick still gets me everytime. Excellent job!

First handheld flop of 2024. Glad I didn’t pre-order this garbage. Will wait on ROG Ally 2 and hopefully they won’t use Intel iGPU.

Extremely informative and very well presented. This same Claw chassis would be great with an AMD APU.

I'm happy that intel is in the scene to compete. Unfortunate that this device has so many shortcomings

That is a sick transition from the thumbnail.

wait the way the thumbnail transitions into the video was amazing i wish more channels do that

Amazing in-depth review, subbed

Really wonder why they went with intel for a "Gaming handheld" there game driver is still not on par with amd or nvidia.

How is it in emulators? Should be good, no? With all those cores

I've never watched a video where you could hear disappointment in the reviewer's voice for the whole 50 minute video Thanks for being so dedicated Phawx, I really appreciate the time and effort you put into your videos!

I had backed the OneXPlayer X1 Ultra (same chip as the claw) and dropped support for many of the reasons this video showed. First clue was OneX would stall when asked for true numbers showing frame rates between AMD and Intel - and the made handhelds that used both chips. Got worse stalling when asking for lower wattage data between the chips. Was waiting for this review. Not sure drivers can fix a lot of this….

That thumbnail to video transition 🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶🥶

The best review by far the tear down the breakdown of power consumption shutting things off going into the BIOS this is all the s*** I want to know first time finding the channel best review by far looking forward to many more videos awesome keep up the good work I subscribed👊

I had this new generation mini pc .. .same story right 😅

Give it 3 or 4 months tops for the MSI Claw price to drop drastically, every outlet and channles have the consistency of being disappointed and turned off by the Claws performance overall, especially seeing a RU-vid channel made a video saying why their returning their claw

It’ll be interesting to see how this develops as the firmware etc matures. For me it’s not an option at the moment as there seems to be an exclusive seller in the UK and they aren’t a company I’d willingly buy from

It's amazing that in the last 5 years AMD went from having no products of any particular value to now creating and commanding the entire handheld PC market (Yes Valve helped a lot but AMD had to develop the architecture to use in that application in the first place).

How do you not reach 100k? This quality is insane and the amount of work...

how does it compares on the emulation side of things? specially interested on rpcs3

this is an upload you need . you got a like and sub dude

Great vid. Am thinking between the rog ally and this, but watching this video you convinced me not to buy it lol. Do you have a similar video about the rog ally? Am curious about undervolt if is posible. Thanks

Hey this is porbably such a weird comment, but that thumbnail tranistion into the video was really cool, wasn't expecting to mouse over a video in my feed and see soemthing that smooth, it immediately drew me in!

Man i subscribed cause i like the depth of your reviews. Please make legion go next. See ya

Couple of questions... You did your 'even when doing the least possible, this still uses a lot of power' bit right after the 'this his how to disable all the efficiency cores' bit. That makes it look like you were testing the 'idle' power consumption while forcing everything to run on the less efficient but higher performance parts of the processor. I assume that you re-enabled the E cores off screen in between, but maybe mention that in the video? And you mention in the bit about the fan at the end that the TDP can be set to 30 or even 40, but all your game testing is done at no higher than 25. Is that because you tested it going higher and there was no actual improvement in performance, because you couldn't do a direct comparison to AMD devices, or just because you believe that any configuration that uses up the battery that quickly is useless in a handheld? If somebody was only using this plugged in for some reason, could it outperform other small-form-factor machines? I agree that sacrificing efficiency for peak performance would generally be a bad tradeoff when you're trying to make ultra-portable hardware. But it should be clear whether this is actually worse in every aspect, or if the problem is that they tried to optimize it like a gaming laptop instead of like a handheld. All that said, I think the driver compatibility issues alone would be enough to kill this for most people. If only a fraction of games are looking polished and a significant number just never start up at all, that's pretty much a dealbreaker. Even if there's ways to find a workaround, it's a big investment of time and effort where any other handheld would let me just run things out of the box.

With the idle power draw, did you turn the E-cores back on? Would that make a difference?

Love that the first 8 minutes of the review is a deep-dive into advanced BIOS settings. Never change Phawx.

Woah, that thumbnail to video transition is slick

Very nice video review the best I’ve seen so far. I see the high idle wattage on this is very much like the issues on the arc graphics cards. I’d say this is hardware related issues and won’t be fixed and again the drivers took a year to improve but a lot needed again to fix games. I agree it’s not recommended to buy this device as the next gen Amd will be around the corner and are power efficient. I want a competitive market maybe intel down the line can improve

im happily waiting for my VRR capable gpd win mini. so done with this controller setup on windows. trackpads are essential

Hey Phawx, why do you think your Cyberpunk results are like HALF the FPS of what ETA Prime showed for the Onexplayer X1 with the same chip? (see his First Look video on that device. His was at 1200p Low, I'm not sure what the SteamDeck preset is but with such a big resolution increase and double the FPS it seems really wonky...

Question, does something like Tiny11 or Ghost specter have a potential to help the performance of the Claw, for games the run out course, would there be an fps boost(and maybe idle power draw fix)? Or would this introduce some sort of major bugs making it unplayable anyways?

In 2024 steam deck oled with its price tag, performance at low tdp, accessibility, software support, trackpads, steam input, and flexible and open source Linux base, has just NO competition. Raw power is nothing. Control, optimization and the good user experience on the software side is key. And the steam deck is just on another level.

holly crap i just realize i watch this 50-minute long video.

That thumbnail transition caught me so off guard that I had to double take AND double check

Question. Do u still testing the oled screen at the back there?

Excellent work!

First time watching and that transition from thumbnail to video was impressive

hi phawx i have my efficiency cores in the bios Greyed in the advanced-unlocked menu. You did some extra step before?

Thank you Phawx

What an excellent review! We need more honest reviews like this with people who know what they are talking about. Well done sir!

It’s crazy because people said this wouldn’t be good before it even launched.. damn.

Very interesting results! Curious if you compare the MSI Claws idle power consumption to the One X Players Intel 155H device, if you will see the same high idle power consumptions, just to do (albeit low sample size) a like for like comparison from different hardware manufactures? Just curious if the power consumption can be corrected with a different bios update or something.

I knew this (MSI Claw) would be hot garbage.

Ok this was the last and best video i needed,,i factory resetted my Claw I7 and its back in the box…refund it tommorow

Excellent depth. Great job.

Just a crazy thought, possile to only use E cores?

Shout out : Great work on equalizing the power consumption across these diverse chipsets, giving a much more reliable and useful perf/w comparison.

That’s sad, would’ve loved more competition and everyone having platform, Nvidia with Switch/2, AMD with Steam Deck(OLED and whatever is next), ROG Ally/2 and Legion Go and last but not least Intel with MSI Claw. 2 questions, what kind of panel does it use? 1080p 120Hz VRR LCD like Ally? And can you change color of each individual face button? So I can change them to lit up only in Xbox button colors? Thanks in advance for answering!

Love the honesty man!

I hope you can bring some insight of the new MSI Claw 8 AI+ and if that one will solve the many flaws of this one , also release date , price , etc , so we can know if it will be an alternative to the Ally X (if the price is around the 800)

The thumbnail transition hits extra hard today 😂

Would have been interesting to see different core counts (4P+4e) and (4P) to see if it improves as should reduce power the cpu tile draws

This is the best analysis of Meteor Lake's performance in video games, I always hate that in these types of videos people use FSR or XeSS with like 50% internal resolution.

every thing i own is amd, my laptop, my desktop, my original steam deck, my legion go heck even my ps5 has AMD chips it in.

Great review!

Your review was what I was waiting for. Now to wait also for Gamer's Nexus and Retro Game Corps reviews to see their thoughts

for msi first time doing handheld i think theres definitely improvements. with the recent software updates i see on their website i hope those help with performance!

It's sad but kinda hilarious that the MSI claw is already with 100€ (around 108 USD) discount here in Amazon Germany. It's still 100€ more expensive than the Ally Z1extreme (the lower end MSI Claw!). What was MSI thinking?!

what I take from this - - is just how awesome AMD did in making their mobile/game soc/platform. We are years into this now, and Intel really has no viable answer.

I wonder if there would be any performance gain from disabling just some of the p cores since they use more power robbing the igpu?

Perfect circularity should be the desirable and more logical result since the stick gate is circular thus should map into circle, but the main issue is mostly whether the app/game mapped to a more square result or circle result. Is a game accept 1,1 as the most bottom right corner or some value that correspond to the actual stick position in a circle (which definitely will be lower than on each axis). The difference can be that a stick that have more square shape in the circularity test can have more range of motion or the stick can have an outside dead zone which is not desirable when you want it to be precise. The reverse is also true, where a stick with perfect circularity can ended up have less range of motion or being more precise. As for power consumption, this is basically the same problem that AMD encounter with their chiplet design which is higher idle power. There is really no way around it, something with chiplet or multiple chip glued together will have power consumption penalty. Intel trying to mitigate it with basically have the main SoC tile that contains pretty much everything to run the device (thus 2 low power E-cores) thus they can disable the compute/CPU tile, but probably still not enough to reach the same idle efficiency as non tile architecture. AMD Phoenix and Hawk Point are of course monolithic thus didn't have the glue penalty. Honestly I don't think this is something that can be solved entirely. Maybe with more optimization you can get the power consumption to be closer to a monolithic architecture but again, it will never be as efficient as a monolithic approach. Physics.

Can u please review the onexplayer x1. Wanna c your thoughts on the unit

sorry but the way the thumbnail blends into the video is just fantastic

This is the heat we've been waiting for. I got my coffee and danish ready.

looking to see the driver update that could make things better :)

That thing shows AMT configuration in the hidden settings... does it really support AMT? Does the ctrl-p setup hotkey work?

Regarding the power, especially idle power, I wouldn't put all the blame on Intel. I found out from Wolfgang's channel that different motherboards and the number of ports and if they're connected or not, can matter a lot, especially visible in power draw. Also, Windows itself is pinnacle of bloat. Seeing 216 !! processes at 6:37 makes me think that MSI did jack $#!t at debloating Windows. Also also MSI's own MSI Center, I wouldn't bet on it being made to be power efficient. So, what I'm trying to say, I wouldn't be surprised AT ALL if it's all MSI's fault for the power management. If this is fixable through software, driver and firmware updates... that's another question. Hopefully it is, but it's not guaranteed. Very solid review though! Is there a chance we can see more fiddling with cores active ? Like only running on E cores, or only running with 4 P cores. Checking with and without the 2 LP E cores. Checking if it can be undervolted. Things like that. Oh, and manually trying to debloat Windows, who knows, it might actually do wonders :))

It was particularly a long vid, but informative. He should test it out with the latest update Intel arc released. Since it imported games significantly

The unit has such high spikes even on idle. What are the causes of these spikes? They must be the same that cause it to freeze frequently while playing.

Any hope for this? I’m happy with the OLED Deck but more competition and choices is a good thing

This review really needed some indie game benchmarks to highlight even more the power struggles, we could see how 10w was performing in AAA games but how does 10w perform in indie games like dead cells etc because we know handhelds like steam deck can play those kinds of games set to 4w and get 60fps plus and the ally can play those games pretty comfortable set to its minimum 7w meaning on steam deck i can achieve 12 hours plus battery life in some cases and the ally i get around 4 hours still set to 7w so terrible but we all knew that... at least it still performs well... it seems like set to 10w the claw is barely able to function and this may crumble even indie game performance, so would have been good to see some indie testing, especially considering that these machines are perfect for indie typically, far more so than AAA gaming. great in depth review as always though, cheers.

These chips are interesting. From what one can garner, them basically chopping up the chip and futzing more with Northbridge and segmenting it more, are we not just adding latency and inefficiency? There's a reason why old monolithic architectures feel snappy .

Disable xmp or reduce xmp memory voltage to reduce power draw. And if available try real-time memory overclocking to regain xmp at load

I don't understand why MSI decided to partner up with Intel on this. It was basically DOA on launch. I know exactly 0 people who are interested in this product.

for a copycat of the Ally it's DoA, it's slow, it looks like those chinese no-brand generic pc controllers and in my country they charge it slightly above the Ally w/ Z1 Extreme, the nerve.

41:48 "We're gonna finish off on the front end of this device" Phawx, 2024