In a nutshell: MSI’s handheld gaming PC has landed and is able to go toe to toe with Valve’s venerable Steam Deck. Unveiled earlier this 12 months at CES, the MSI Claw is powered by an Intel Core Extremely processor of your selecting. The hand-held ships with a 7-ich FHD (1,920 x 1,080 decision) touchscreen with 120 Hz refresh price that covers 100% of the sRGB shade house, and makes use of Corridor Impact triggers and joysticks which ought to remove drift issues.
Underneath the hood is a six-cell 53 Wh battery that is reportedly good for as much as two hours of full-bore use.
The entry stage Claw, which is accessible to order now over on MSI’s web site, features a Core Extremely 5-135H alongside 16 GB of LPDDR5 reminiscence and a 512 GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD, and is priced at $699.
Two higher-spec’d variants are additionally within the pipeline, together with a mannequin with a Core Extremely 7-155H CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB SSD for $749, and one other that bumps storage as much as 1 TB for $799. Each could be pre-ordered over on Newegg, and present a launch date of March 15.
Those that order by means of Newegg will even obtain a free copy of Ubisoft’s Cranium & Bones and a free month of Xbox Recreation Go.
MSI’s Claw is the newest in a rising checklist of handheld gaming techniques, bumping shoulders with the Asus ROG Ally, the Lenovo Legion Go, the Steam Deck, and others. These machines owe their existence to the Nintendo Swap, the hand-held that Nintendo gambled (and received huge) with in 2017.
Nintendo is predicted to ship a follow-up to the unique Swap in early 2025. The Switch 2 {hardware}, which has reportedly been able to go since late 2022, is predicted to make use of a cost-optimized model of Nvidia’s Orin constructed on an 8nm course of with some effectivity tweaks from Lovelace. It’s going to additionally seemingly embody a bigger 8-inch show and as a lot as 16 GB of RAM (though 12 GB appears way more seemingly).
