On January 4 MSI took to its social media accounts to tease an upcoming product that seemed to be a gaming handheld, and right this moment that handheld has leaked and it’s referred to as the MSI Claw. With MSI now within the sport, there aren’t many large gaming PC manufacturers left that haven’t determined to enterprise into this phase of the market. Valve form of paved the way in which and made gaming handheld PCs extra mainstream. It wasn’t the primary to do that in fact. Firms like GPD had been making handheld PCs properly earlier than Valve. However Valve is a a lot larger firm and let’s be trustworthy. Each gamer is aware of what Steam is.
So when the Steam Deck hit the market, different large manufacturers following swimsuit was inevitable. At this time, there’s now ASUS and Lenovo within the combine with the ROG ally and the Legion Go. And now the MSI Claw. That leaves perhaps Acer with its Predator line and Alienware. Alienware did technically make a handheld gaming PC with the ‘UFO’ that it confirmed off at CES in 2020. However that was only a idea machine and was by no means launched. Nevertheless, we did nonetheless give it our Better of CES award that 12 months as a result of it was a extremely cool idea we had been hoping we may at some point purchase.
MSI Claw leaked data suggests a strong machine
MSI isn’t slated to disclose the Claw handheld in full till CES. So it’s nonetheless unclear what the entire options and specs may be. Nevertheless, the leak does quit some fairly fascinating data. In keeping with the leak, the MSI Claw will include an Intel Core Extremely 7 155H chip, and 32GB of RAM. No handhelds have used the Intel Core Extremely chips but. They usually haven’t been examined so it’s not fairly clear how they’d evaluate to the Ryzen Z1 Excessive that you simply’ll discover within the Ally and Legion Go.
That being mentioned, the Claw’s Intel Core Extremely APU makes use of Arc graphics. It additionally has a barely decrease clock pace on each the SoC GPU and the APU in comparison with the Z1 Excessive setup. For reference, as identified by VideoCardz, the Z1 Excessive can clock as much as 5.1GHz whereas the Intel Core Extremely 7 155H can clock as much as 4.8GHz. Nevertheless, the Intel setup within the Claw has extra cores and a better thread depend. It’s obtained 16 cores and 22 threads in comparison with the Z1 Excessive’s 8 cores and 16 threads. With these figures, there’s definitely an opportunity that the Claw may carry out higher.
It additionally comes with what seems to be 32GB of RAM. Which is double what you get from ASUS and Lenovo. One other factor to remember is that the SoC has a TDP of 28W. That is decrease than the utmost on the Ally and Legion Go. Which is 30W. However these even have a spread for the TDP that may scale right down to 9W. Whereas the Claw doesn’t seem to supply that. At the least not primarily based on the leaked specs. And that might imply the Claw would find yourself working slightly hotter which may affect efficiency throughout longer periods.
When will this launch?
That’s robust to say. However given MSI is already teasing the machine and plans to disclose it at CES subsequent week, likelihood is, a launch isn’t far off. The hypothesis is that MSI is planning to launch the Claw someday within the first quarter of 2024. Which may put the launch anyplace between January 8 and late March. As for price, there’s nothing within the leak about pricing or the place MSI plans to launch the machine. But when it needs to be aggressive, it’ll must launch the machine at the least in all the identical markets as its rivals. In regards to the worth, something over $799 is more likely to make the MSI Claw a tough promote.
Nevertheless it’s additionally potential that the corporate may very well be planning a number of SKUs not not like the opposite handhelds. This manner there may very well be an entry-level SKU that’s extra reasonably priced and perhaps even a mid-range and/or high-end SKU for many who need a extra highly effective machine. Along with the specs particulars, the MSI Claw additionally leaked in an image. Which you’ll be able to see under.
It seems MSI has gone the identical route as ASUS and offered customers with offset joysticks that every characteristic RGB lighting. You would additionally see this in MSI’s teaser. It additionally seems to be like there’s an 8-way d-pad and a set of 4 buttons for navigating menus. You may as well see air vents or audio system close to the underside of the unit.
