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On January 4 MSI took to its social media accounts to tease an upcoming product that appeared to be a gaming handheld, and today that handheld has leaked and it’s called the MSI Claw. With MSI now in the game, there aren’t many big gaming PC brands left that haven’t decided to venture into this segment of the market. Valve sort of paved the way and made gaming handheld PCs more mainstream. It wasn’t the first to do this of course. Companies like GPD were making handheld PCs well before Valve. But Valve is a much bigger company and let’s be honest. Every gamer knows what Steam is.
So when the Steam Deck hit the market, other big brands following suit was inevitable. Today, there’s now ASUS and Lenovo in the mix with the ROG ally and the Legion Go. And now the MSI Claw. That leaves maybe Acer with its Predator line and Alienware. Alienware did technically make a handheld gaming PC with the ‘UFO’ that it showed off at CES in 2020. But that was just a concept device and was never released. However, we did still give it our Best of CES award that year because it was a really cool concept we were hoping we could one day buy.
MSI Claw leaked information suggests a powerful machine
MSI isn’t slated to reveal the Claw handheld in full until CES. So it’s still unclear what all of the features and specs might be. However, the leak does give up some pretty interesting information. According to the leak, the MSI Claw will come with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H chip, and 32GB of RAM. No handhelds have used the Intel Core Ultra chips yet. And they haven’t been tested so it’s not quite clear how they would compare to the Ryzen Z1 Extreme that you’ll find in the Ally and Legion Go.
That being said, the Claw’s Intel Core Ultra APU uses Arc graphics. It also has a slightly lower clock speed on both the SoC GPU and the APU compared to the Z1 Extreme setup. For reference, as pointed out by VideoCardz, the Z1 Extreme can clock up to 5.1GHz while the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H can clock up to 4.8GHz. However, the Intel setup in the Claw has more cores and a higher thread count. It’s got 16 cores and 22 threads compared to the Z1 Extreme’s 8 cores and 16 threads. With those figures, there’s certainly a chance that the Claw could perform better.
It also comes with what appears to be 32GB of RAM. Which is double what you get from ASUS and Lenovo. Another thing to keep in mind is that the SoC has a TDP of 28W. This is lower than the maximum on the Ally and Legion Go. Which is 30W. But those also have a range for the TDP that can scale down to 9W. Whereas the Claw doesn’t appear to offer that. At least not based on the leaked specs. And that could mean the Claw would end up running a little hotter which could impact performance during longer sessions.
When will this launch?
That’s tough to say. But given MSI is already teasing the device and plans to reveal it at CES next week, chances are, a launch isn’t far off. The speculation is that MSI is planning to release the Claw sometime in the first quarter of 2024. Which could put the launch anywhere between January 8 and late March. As for cost, there’s nothing in the leak about pricing or where MSI plans to launch the device. But if it wants to be competitive, it’ll have to launch the device at least in all the same markets as its competitors. Concerning the price, anything over $799 is likely to make the MSI Claw a hard sell.
But it’s also possible that the company could be planning multiple SKUs not unlike the other handhelds. This way there could be an entry-level SKU that’s more affordable and maybe even a mid-range and/or high-end SKU for those who want a more powerful machine. In addition to the specs details, the MSI Claw also leaked in an image. Which you can see below.
It appears MSI has gone the same route as ASUS and provided users with offset joysticks that each feature RGB lighting. You could also see this in MSI’s teaser. It also looks like there’s an 8-way d-pad and a suite of four buttons for navigating menus. You can also see air vents or speakers near the bottom of the unit.
