James Archer
One thing this review can’t tell you is how exactly the MSI Claw 8 AI+ improves on the original Claw, for the simple reason that MSI themselves binned off the latter before I had a chance to try it. Three months, it lasted, before this do-over got announced. Three months! And people say the Steam Deck OLED came too soon.
The good news is that the Claw 8 AI+’s mostly-internal revamping – new CPU, new GPU, fatter battery etc. – has produced a handheld that not only thrashes Valve’s upgraded Steam Deck on games performance, but is up there with the best of its Windows-based brethren-portables on longevity. You know what, it probably is better than the Claw. Yeah.
All the same, the Claw 8 AI+ won’t suit everyone, especially those of petite mitt. At 299mm wide and 24mm thick in the middle, it’s a far bulkier handheld than any Steam Deck, and at 795g it’s almost as heavy as the slabbish Lenovo Legion Go. It’s also an expensive investment in a market that’s increasingly stuffed with expensive investments, its frightful £899 / $900 price tag dwarfing even those of the Legion Go, the Asus ROG Ally X, and the Zotac Zone. And, once again, you don’t even get a case.
Why endure all this mass, and/or massive financial damage? Primarily, it’s because within that hefty shell lies one very enthusiastically beating heart. MSI have stuck by their experiment in using Intel chips instead of the current handheld PC-standard AMD APUs, and in particular, the Claw 8 AI+’s Arc 140V GPU pays off. Even running games at native 1200p, it repeatedly outpaces the 800p-limited Steam Deck, and either beats or (more or less) matches other high-end Windows machines like the ROG Ally X and Zotac Zone.
The Claw 8 AI+ also avoids a trap that the Legion Go, blinded by the pursuit of impressive-sounding specs, blundered into: its screen isn’t mismatched to its performance. Rather than overshoot with an excessively high resolution that its internals couldn’t properly support, the Claw 8 AI+’s 8in, 1920×1200 panel doesn’t waste anything, with a pleasant 45-60fps clearly possible in numerous 3D, AAA fare. Dropping to 1280×800 (or simply playing less demanding games, of which thousands are available) can also easily see framerates high above 60fps, where you can take proper advantage of the 120Hz refresh rate.
The Claw 8 AI+ won’t run everything. Monster Hunter Wilds’ benchmark tool returned a lowly 27fps, on minimum settings and Ultra Performance-level FSR upscaling. Yet it does make a clear up on the Steam Deck by handling games that aren’t quite feasible on Valve’s handheld. Space Marine II, for example, can’t make it to a stable 30fps on the Deck, but I was getting 30-40fps on the Claw 8 AI+ with Low quality and FSR on its legible Performance mode. Likewise, Horizon Forbidden West needs Ultra Performance upscaling to even approach playability on the Deck, but here it seldom dropped below 30fps with FSR on its much sharper Quality setting.
An enormous stretch of rear vents helps make sure this performance hotness doesn’t convert into regular hotness, and while the fans aren’t as whispery as the Steam Deck OLED’s, the Claw 8 AI+’s thunderous speakers can easily drown them out. At home, anyway. Bluetooth and a 3.5mm jack combine for headphone options, which I do recommend as an alternative to being stomped to death by irate commuters.
You’d certainly have plenty of time to inflict eardrum damage on your fellow passengers, as the Claw 8 AI+’s chunky 80Whr battery – up from 53Whr on the original Claw – makes it one of the longest-lasting handheld PCs in the business. Not quite to the extent of the Steam Deck OLED, which made some clever efficiency improvements to become seemingly unbeatable in low-demand games: the Claw 8 AI+’s 3h 22m in Portal 2 is both great by Windows standards and nowhere near the Deck OLED’s 5h 48m. But then, the MSI’s 2h 13m in Elden Ring is only a single minute shy of the Deck OLED’s 2h 14m, showing a capability to catch up in thirstier games.
Among its Windows rivals, the only one that can stand up to the Claw 8 AI+ on endurance is the ROG Ally X, and that fell short in Portal 2 with 2h 59m. The Asus device took a narrow lead in Forza Horizon 5, lasting 2h 55m to the 2h 52m of the Claw 8 AI+, though considering the latter has a bigger, more pixel-rich screen, I’d still say it puts in the more formidable battery performance.
The screen itself ain’t half bad either, covering 99.1% of the sRGB colour gamut and hitting a contrast ratio of 1412:1 – which is benchmark-speak for rich colours and deep blacks. For this money, however, it does feel a bit skimpish to only get an LCD/IPS panel, rather than an OLED display like that of the updated Steam Deck or Zotac Zone. Besides being physically thinner and more power-efficient, excellent qualities for a portable PC, those OLED screens both produce infinite contrast and brightness that peaks at over 900cd/m2 in HDR-compatible games. The Claw 8 AI+ lacks this HDR support as its brightness tops out at 521cd/m2, which isn’t even higher than that on the original, LCD Steam Deck. You’d likely need most of those nits, in any event, as a defence against the reflectivity of the Claw 8 AI+’s glossy screen; an anti-glare finish being another Steam Deck OLED perk that this model lacks.
This odd blend of high specs and lower-end basicness is repeatedly evident in the Claw 8 AI+’s design. You do get some niceties, like the dual USB-C ports up next to the top-mounted microSD card slot, as well as a fingerprint sensor built into the power button. But then it’s also covered in cheap-feeling plastic, with smaller, less hardy thumbsticks than those of the far more affordable Deck OLED. There’s not a single trackpad to help navigate the very much touchscreen-unfriendly Windows 11, and I personally don’t vibe with the front panelling’s damp, dour, greenish-grey colour scheme, which looks as if MSI just raided the paint storage cupboard of a disused Lada factory.
That’s not a huge bother – unless you’re more of a Trabant fan – but the difficulties in wielding Windows will be. Yes, Windows 11 still feels as lost and confused on a handheld as it did on the first ROG Ally. It’s telling that the constant fiddliness of poking at its shrunken UI actually represents one of its lesser headaches, as the OS always seems more bug-prone on these portable PCs than it does on desktops, and the Claw 8 AI+ is sadly no exception. On top of similar issues with randomly resizing app windows as I had on the Zotac Zone, one particularly annoying input bug saw the A button cease to register in Steam, forcing me onto the touchscreen.
MSI has made the effort to add some handheld-specific comforts, in the forms of a handy quick-settings overlay menu and its Center M all-in-one games launcher, though neither are truly game-changing for Windows’s fortunes. The settings overlay sometimes only appears after a few seconds of lag, and the launcher’s side-scrolling interface only fits five games onscreen at most, so I ended up almost never using it. As with any Windows handheld, you do get a wider range of natively supported game launchers than on SteamOS, though considering most of these can be installed on a Steam Deck with Lutris anyway, that’s less of an advantage than it sounds like.
Blemishes like this, the merely okay display, and the dull design mean that it’s impossible to get outright excited about the MSI Claw 8 AI+. Especially when, for 900 big ones, you could quite reasonably expect top-of-the-line features throughout. Still, it’s not like this is some thumbsticked bauble either. It is, in fact, the most powerful (on average) handheld PC among its peers, and unlike the similarly framerate-minded Zotac Zone, doesn’t compromise on battery life to get there.
By these metrics – and I’m forced to conclude that they are more important than whether it looks like a Soviet sedan – the MSI Claw 8 AI+ isn’t just a necessary tweak to the doomed first-gen Claw. It’s a good, strong handheld in its own right, and the performance and practicality it brings are worthy additions to the ever-growing portable scene.
This review is based on a review unit provided by the manufacturer.
ranzware
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