The MSI Claw EX is the most important handheld since Steam Deck — I still wouldn’t buy one

As The Verge’s resident handheld reviewer, I have nearly every portable gaming PC on a shelf in my house. The MSI Claw 8 EX AI Plus is now the first one I reach for. Thanks to a next-gen Intel chip and improved MSI design, the Claw EX is the most powerful handheld that truly feels portable. It’s the handheld with the longest battery life, and the first Windows handheld I can trust to sleep and wake reliably.

Like the Steam Deck, when I press the power button, my game is always right where I left off. Unlike the Steam Deck, it can hibernate for days without losing a significant amount of charge.

Performance and battery? Windows and sleep? I wish I could say “you can have your cake and eat it too.” But you can’t. You probably shouldn’t.

You can’t because this is a Ferris Bueller Product Review — this handheld costs a staggering $1,800, and you’ll be lucky to find it even at that price. (MSI’s Anne Lee tells me the US should have limited supply sometime this month.)

Even if you could, you probably shouldn’t because Intel and MSI and Microsoft didn’t fully stick the landing. This is indeed a milestone for the handheld gaming space. But like actual milestones on a highway, you should probably drive right past.

The Claw EX does have comfortable grips, I’ll give it that. Those manta-ray-wings wonderfully spread out its weight, to the point that the 1.73-pound (785g) portable feels far more comfortable than the 1.58-pound (715g) Xbox Ally X when I hold it above me in bed.

And while a $1,800 handheld should really have an amazing OLED screen, I definitely prefer the Claw EX’s 8-inch 1920 x 1200 48-120Hz VRR screen to the comparatively cramped 7-inch 1080p one in the Allys. The only real problem is glare — the ultra-glossy screen was not great on my road trip this summer.

But the controls are merely average, the fan is loud (though it’s whoosh not whine), and those manta-ray grips can buzz my hands when I turn up the speakers. Sound reverberates inside.

No, the Claw EX’s true strengths are performance and battery — but even there, the handheld sometimes let me down.

I’ve always loved the phrase “potato graphics.” It’s such a fun way to describe what games look like when your rig is too weak. They’re rough and pasty — like a potato! — even when running smoothly. Or if you turn up the graphics anyway, you get a “slideshow” because your hardware can’t deliver enough frames.

The first reason I reach for the Claw EX, before any other handheld, is because I don’t automatically get potatoes or slideshow when I fire up demanding PC games.

Like my colleague Jay Peters showed you on launch day, the Claw EX makes games look so much sharper than they do on a Steam Deck, and it’s not just the Deck that’s getting beat. The Xbox Ally X with its AMD Z2 Extreme chip, and the old MSI Claw 8 with Intel Lunar Lake, aren’t playing demanding games smoothly at the 1080p or 1200p resolution of their screens.

The Claw EX often can, and I’m seeing around 40 percent more performance than the Xbox Ally X in my tests at 1080p. In many games, like Forza Horizon 6 and Cyberpunk 2077, that’s the difference between playing at native resolution or settling for less.

When I add a little upscaling, I can even start enjoying games I haven’t been able to enjoy handheld because of potato graphics. I could swing lightsabers in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and crack whips in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at good quality with smooth frame rate while binging K-dramas with my spouse.

Until, suddenly, I couldn’t — seemingly because Intel’s drivers aren’t playing nice with some games yet. When my Indy visited the Great Pyramid, the Intel chip would simply not run at the wattage I set, and I found spots where the entire game would repeatedly freeze or even trigger a full system hang.

In Jedi: Survivor, the game is weirdly stuttery in some areas, even though I get far more resolution and smoother frame rate on the Claw EX than the Xbox Ally X. Until a recent Intel update, Expedition 33 had what looked like intense graphical corruption around its particle effects in the game, turning them into glitchy spots of light.

And you should take Returnal benchmark numbers with a grain of salt, because many graphical effects are entirely missing on Intel. Undergrowth and volumetric fog are barely there; stone objects no longer explode into showers of rock; transparent energy shields are weirdly opaque.

The second reason I reach for the Claw EX is that battery life. Like some of its competitors, it has a big 80 watt-hour pack — but the Intel chip can stretch that battery even further than the competition.

Take Cyberpunk 2077, for example. To hit a smooth 70fps average at 720p resolution, the Xbox Ally X and the last-gen Claw require around 30 watts of total power, draining their batteries in roughly 2.5 hours. With the new Claw, you can reach that same performance with 21 watts, giving you a whole extra hour on a charge.

Or take Balatro, the 2D magic poker game that’s become my best-case battery life test. Just by toggling the Claw EX’s “Endurance” mode and setting the screen to 48Hz instead of 120Hz in the Quick Settings menu, I got the handheld’s total system power draw down to just 6.5 watts, enough to last 12 whole hours on a charge. It’s rare to get epic battery life for 2D indie games and performance for triple-A ones from a single chip.

But this strength of the Claw EX is flawed, too. When I drain the battery below 15 percent charge with triple-A games, performance dramatically dips. My chip couldn’t maintain its 25W performance mode and switched to 15W instead. That performance didn’t immediately come back when I plugged the handheld in.

And though the Claw EX might be the first Windows handheld that properly sleeps and wakes right out of the box, that doesn’t excuse its other Windows woes.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve launched a game and been left staring at a black screen, wondering when it’ll finally appear, only to discover it was already running in the background and didn’t show itself. I don’t appreciate having to hold down the Task Switcher button to fix a game that didn’t properly launch full-screen, or having to quit out to desktop mode to download the latest Intel drivers. The handheld should really automatically alert me when they’re available.

I nearly did a spit take when Windows told me I couldn’t use my handheld’s control panel because, and I quote, “Most of the features in Quick Settings require administration privileges. To use all the features, please switch to an administrator account.”

Thankfully, a reboot fixed that.

I instinctively reach for the Claw EX, instead of any other handheld, because I’m borrowing it from Intel instead of paying cash — and because I’m willing to tolerate its idiosyncrasies for fewer potato graphics. At $1,800, I wouldn’t.

Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge