MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ Review: Great Power, Shocking Price

It’s practically covered successful ports—two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C, a microSD slot, and adjacent a 3.5-mm audio jack. It’s comparatively future-proof, allowing you to upgrade the SSD (if they’re ever affordable again), with Wi-Fi 7 support.

It’s each crammed into a “Void Purple” ammunition that impresses with a premium feel. An etched micro-texture offers a unafraid grip, portion the Xbox-standard power layout is wrong casual scope for astir players, though the 4 paper and strategy buttons flanking the surface whitethorn necessitate a stretch. Analog sticks (encircled with LED airy halos, naturally) and enarthrosis triggers are built with Hall effect sensors for improved accuracy and semipermanent resilience and connection a bully grade of absorption erstwhile pressed. The chunky, angular D-pad feels large too, though its concave signifier whitethorn instrumentality a infinitesimal to get utilized to, and its glossy integrative picks up microscratches easily.

Although it’s moving Windows 11 nether the hood, the full-screen Xbox Mode takes the lead, giving a unified presumption of games installed from immoderate storefront. The Claw lacks a dedicated Xbox strategy button, but with 2 mappable rear grip buttons, it’s casual capable to delegate one. Given that you tin instal immoderate different client, I acceptable the different arsenic a Steam paper button, utile for shortcuts erstwhile moving Steam’s Big Picture Mode.

Despite the Claw’s 785-gram heft, its ergonomics and value organisation compensate wonderfully. It outweighs some the Steam Deck and the ROG Xbox Ally X, but I recovered it overmuch much comfy to use, adjacent for protracted play sessions. Advanced haptics besides impress, with a bully consciousness of feedback accurately representing on-screen action.

The surface is great, but not amazing. The IPS sheet delivers a crisp, wide representation with brightness up to 500 nits, but astatine this price, I’d anticipation for an OLED sheet to marque colors truly pop. That 120-Hz VRR ensures a creaseless representation astatine least, and the 16:10 facet ratio gives a subtle but noticeable spot much existent property to your games.

I wasn’t initially a instrumentality of the surface extending beneath the “shell” of the unit, but it's a clever design, serving arsenic a kickstand to fto the handheld basal vertically. This is amazingly utile if you privation to link the instrumentality to an output dock for TV play. I utilized an OWC Thunderbolt Go dock, and portion it's not arsenic elegant oregon unafraid arsenic sliding a Nintendo Switch 2 into its caddy, it means the Claw tin acceptable neatly into a media unit. Just brace a crippled controller and you’re bully for big-screen gaming.

Arc de Triomphe

The existent prima of the Claw is Intel’s caller Arc chipset, which delivers phenomenal results. The Arc G3 Extreme is built astir Intel’s Panther Lake architecture, which offers a monolithic show summation implicit the preceding Lunar Lake chips. It’s importantly faster than beauteous overmuch immoderate different spot successful a PC handheld, and Intel’s XeSS—Xe Super Sampling, its reply to Nvidia’s DLSS oregon AMD’s FSR—can amended show further with astute upscaling and framework generation.