In a nutshell: MSI’s handheld gaming PC has landed and is ready to go toe to toe with Valve’s venerable Steam Deck. Unveiled earlier this yr at CES, the MSI Claw is powered by an Intel Core Ultra processor of your selecting. The handheld 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 area, and makes use of Hall Effect triggers and joysticks which ought to remove drift issues.
Under the hood is a six-cell 53 Wh battery that is reportedly good for up to 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 Ultra 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 in the pipeline, together with a mannequin with a Core Ultra 7-155H CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB SSD for $749, and one other that bumps storage up to 1 TB for $799. Both may be pre-ordered over on Newegg, and present a launch date of March 15.
Those who order by Newegg may also obtain a free copy of Ubisoft’s Skull & Bones and a free month of Xbox Game Pass.
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 Switch, the handheld that Nintendo gambled (and gained massive) with in 2017.
Nintendo is anticipated to ship a follow-up to the unique Switch in early 2025. The Switch 2 {hardware}, which has reportedly been ready to go since late 2022, is anticipated to use a cost-optimized model of Nvidia’s Orin constructed on an 8nm course of with some effectivity tweaks from Lovelace. It’ll additionally seemingly embody a bigger 8-inch show and as a lot as 16 GB of RAM (though 12 GB appears much more seemingly).
