MSI BUILDS LAPTOPS and now PC gaming handhelds too. The new Claw promises smooth 1080p gaming on AAA titles, thanks to the first use of an Intel Core Ultra processor in such a device. At its heart is an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, a Meteor Lake hybrid design. It boasts six performance cores and eight efficiency cores. The P cores max out at 4.8GHz, the E cores at 3.8GHz. It has integrated Arc graphics, with eight Xe cores, and XeSS upscaling. Intel’s recommended customer price is $503. MSI isn’t the first to try Intel in a gaming handheld, but it is the first big player to go Team Blue for this round.
You view the action on a 7-inch touchscreen (1,920 by 1,080) running at 120Hz. There’s a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot for storage, 16GB of memory, and a Thunderbolt 4 port. The 53Wh battery is claimed to be good for two hours of serious gaming. There’s plenty of cooling on offer, with two fans, two heat pipes, and lots of vents. The Intel chip has an official TDP of 28W, but can go much higher, with the full boost quoted as 115W by Intel. It follows the basic design of handhelds: lots of buttons, twin analog thumbsticks, and a weight of 675g. A dock with lots of ports and an external GPU will follow.
The rivals are Valve’s Steam Deck, but there’s also Lenovo’s Legion Go, and Asus’ ROG Ally. All use AMD silicon—MSI reckons the Claw’s Intel innards give it the edge. The $64,000 question is whether it will. Speaking of money, the Claw is due this spring, and there will be three versions. The $699 model has 512GB storage, and a Core Ultra 5 135H processor with four fewer performance cores. Then there’s the $749 model with the full Ultra 7, and the $799 model, with 1TB of storage. Expensive, but it looks sweet.