No one should buy an MSI Claw. Technically, it’s not broken: the first 7-inch Intel Core Ultra portable gaming PC doesn’t crash regularly or anything like that. But the Claw falls so far short of the competition that it’s effectively dead on arrival.
In almost every way, the $750 MSI Claw feels like an inferior clone of the Asus ROG Ally, except it costs more, not less! You could get a much better experience while saving hundreds of dollars if you choose an OLED Steam Deck instead.
I spent weeks looking for a glimmer of hope. Ultimately, I only found three small ways the Claw improves over the competition.
I didn’t start my MSI Claw journey by running benchmarks. My expectations were already at an all-time low, so I started with a simpler test: making the Claw my daily driver for the not-particularly-intensive games I’d already played on other handhelds. I launched the PC port of Studio Ghibli Ni No Kuni, Dave the DiverAnd Fallout: New Vegas – a game that is almost 14 years old.
Each of them works fine on a $549 Steam Deck OLED. None worked smoothly on the $749 MSI Claw. They stuttered or hung, even when the system told me they were hitting 60fps or higher and despite a 48-120Hz variable refresh rate screen that should have smoothed things out. The Claw was also losing frames when the Deck remained stable and delivering fewer frames to begin with.
So I launched more reproducible benchmarks. How well does the Intel Core Ultra 155H really compare to its competitors? Here is an overview:
Tested at 720p low, record Dirt Rally at 720p ultra, using the different power modes of each handheld.
In case your jaw hasn’t hit the floor yet, let me summarize the result for you: the cheaper Steam Deck OLED almost completely wiped the floor with the MSI Claw in power. And performance.
The Claw, set to maximum power and plugged into a wall for a turbo boost, ran some games slower than my battery-only Steam Deck. Can you imagine paying two hundred dollars more to play games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 45 fps instead of 60 — and only when plugged into the wall?
Compared to Windows gaming handhelds, the Claw doesn’t fare any better: competitors Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go offer between 10% more performance and on double performance depending on game and power mode.
There was one positive point: Back, one of the most intensive PC titles I’ve tried, actually ran better on Claw than on Deck or Ally. But not enough to be playable…and when I sat down to play an hour each Shadow of the Tomb Raider And Cyberpunk 2077, I didn’t find them playable either. Both are playable on Steam Deck, ROG Ally, and Lenovo Legion Go at identical (low) settings, so the Claw has no excuse to make a choppy mess.
I even ran 3DMark Time Spy and Fire Strike to see if MSI might have accidentally thrown me a lemon, but no: my Claw scored slightly higher than MSI’s internal benchmark. And yes, I ran these tests on the recent Intel graphics driver that was supposed to have big improvements, not the one Claw originally shipped with.
At least the Claw doesn’t seem to have worse battery life than its Windows peers. MSI gave it a 53 watt-hour battery, slightly larger than Legion Go and significantly larger than Ally, and I saw about the same 1.5 hours of battery life. Shadow of the Tomb Raider for a fee. I had 2 hours and 25 minutes of Fallout: New Vegas and reached a maximum runtime of 4 hours and 19 minutes in Balatro, one of the least demanding games I’ve yet played on a handheld. (My first run lasted 3.25 hours; I got an extra hour by setting the system to Super Battery mode and aggressively dimming the screen.)
But compared to the Steam Deck OLED, which can easily last twice as long in Balatro and lets Lara Croft attack tombs for over two hours, that’s not great – and I have no idea how MSI can justify saying that the Claw “lasts 50% longer” than the handheld medium in its marketing campaign.
It should be noted that MSI did think seriously about Claw’s UX. Although the material may look Like a low-rent Batman edition of Asus’ ROG Ally, using the exact same button layout and most of the same curves, it may feel a little better in the hands. I appreciate its larger grips, more substantial face buttons, and Hall effect joysticks and triggers for longevity. Like the Ally, the Claw has some of the best speakers on a gaming handheld, here augmented by surprisingly good Nahimic virtual surround sound that produced delightful echoes all around me while I couldn’t quite search in tombs.
I wish MSI hadn’t adopted a stiffer but sloppier D-pad or added so many unnecessary tips to its vents – they repeatedly prevented me from finding its charging port in a dark room . The Claw’s growl is also horrible. At least MSI lets you disable it!
But the main thing I’d like to disable is Windows.
It’s been almost a year since Asus released the ROG Ally and more than two years since the Steam Deck, but Microsoft hasn’t done anything significant to make its operating system more friendly to a controller-driven display. I could practically copy/paste my reviews from the ROG Ally review: I’ve had the exact same issues summoning virtual keyboards and playing games – things that mostly work on a Steam Deck despite and/or because of its Linux foundations.
And I experienced sleep issues very similar to what I saw on the Lenovo Legion Go: I just can’t trust this laptop not to wake up when I put it down or drop it in a bag. Only here it’s slightly worse because the MSI Center utility tends to crash upon waking, sometimes disabling my gamepad controls until I restart it.
While MSI Center also buries important features like remappable controls, I like that it includes launchers for all major PC gaming platforms, comes with plenty of quick access shortcuts conveniences that work right out of the box (like a switch that turns off RGB lighting), and are relatively snappy. The Deck, Ally, and Legion Go all had buggier and slower interfaces at launch.
Today, however, they are all much more comprehensive and all allow you to install updates natively, while Claw still expects you to navigate to MSI’s website and download the important stuff manually or wait for Windows Update to deliver the goods.
The MSI brand is not it the worst portable gaming PC I’ve ever touched. Years ago, I played with consoles that didn’t even deserve a review, consoles so poorly thought out and so tightly marketed that I didn’t feel the need to warn you. But stores like Best Buy actually carry the MSI Claw – and in the current lineup of competing handhelds, it’s the worst buy of all.
Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge