The Claw: An Ultra-High Speed Turbo Gamepad with Power, Power, Portability, Wi-Fi, and a USB Cable
But like other Windows handhelds, you do get turbo modes, too: up to 35W on battery power or 40W while plugged into the wall. The 27W performance mode gave me an average of 40FPS at 720p and 30FPS in Mirage, which is more than I have ever seen in a movie. And you can set your own fan curves, map keys, and easily program up to 12-key macros with per-key delays. And the Claw has Wi-Fi 7. While an MSI rep says Windows 11 may not officially support Wi-Fi 7 until the second half of the year, they also claim they saw 4x the speeds in lab testing.
The release of the Steam decks in early 2022, followed by a wave of releases from manufacturers, was not the first iteration of the handheld gaming PC form factor. We’ve seen Asus release the ROG Ally, Lenovo came out with the Legion Go, and even Logitech got involved with the streaming-focused G Cloud.
The Claw has been designed for comfort over long gaming sessions, despite its name, which makes me think of any number of uncomfortable hand positions. The size of the Steam Deck was 294mm wide and is 21.2mm thick, but at 675g is a tad heavier. With any luck, the buttons and Hall effect will prove to be durable in the long run. It has Hall effect joysticks, too, to hopefully avoid any future drift.
The $799 model has up to 1 tb of PCIe M.2 storage and 16 tb of RAM. On the top of the device, there’s a microSD slot for adding more storage capacity, a Thunderbolt 4 port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a power button equipped with a fingerprint sensor. The handheld has macro buttons that are used to record functions, along with illumination around its thumbsticks, which is similar to that of the ROG Ally.
If the recent influx of gaming handhelds has taught us anything, it’s that the handheld gaming PC form factor is filled with endless tradeoffs between power, battery life, portability, specs, and of course, price. We’ll need to wait to find out whether MSI has found the right balance.
I just got hands-on at CES 2024, and I can confidently tell you that as of right now, it’s impossible to say whether it’s any good — that depends on performance and battery life, which are not final. There are some engineering samples that feel like they need a long time of tuning before the first half of 2024.
MSI’s Ally: Benchmarking the Power, Performance and Power of an Intel Core Ultra-Powered CPU at CES 2016 in Mirage and Beyond
The Ally feels cut from the same cloth as the user interface and it needs creature comforts that have not yet come to the Ally, such as the ability to map an XBOX button and anti-deadzone.
The 53 Wh battery is larger than the Ally 40Wh pack and is in line with other brands. The Legion Go has Hall effect Joysticks.
The variable refresh rate is the Ally’s best feature and will be included byMSI in the Deck and Legion Go.
Smooth is not what I’m seeing from the Intel Core Ultra chip. The Intel Core Ultra-powered engineering samples MSI brought to CES are a bit stuttery in gameplay, with loads of frame spikes. The chip currently defaults to a 24W-27W TDP, which is more than I expected from what’s supposedly a more efficient chip than AMD’s. (Again, engineering samples! Likely months before launch!) It is hard to tell the fans are quiet in a crowded room.
It certainly isn’t competitive with the Steam Deck at lower wattage quite yet. I set it to the Super battery saver 15W mode, like for example with the deck, and it struggled in the assassin’s Creed Mirage benchmark even at 720p and lowest settings. I watched an average of just 24 frames per second.
There are artificial intelligence features that you can turn on, such as noise canceling and a performance mode which uses the NPU of the Intel chip to adjust the screen backlight and chip power. When I turned it on in Mirage, I saw the chip wattage range was between 24W and 27W.
Despite the electricity it’s consuming right now, MSI says we should still see two hours of battery on a charge from demanding games, with four hours from lighter fare and five or more hours of video playback. That is certainly not more than I would expect from the Deck, but it has not been a guarantee for Windows handhelds. A rep says they will get 2 hours of Forza 5 in addition to 1 hour from the Ally.
I did see the battery dip 25% over 30 minutes of testing, but I can’t confirm that yet. The math suggests I might have managed two hours if I kept going.