MSI Claw 8 AI+ A2VM review
Pour one out for the original MSI Claw. You can still find it for sale, but with a Meteor Lake Intel chip inside and a chassis design that felt a lot more like a prototype than you'd expect from a modern gaming handheld, it seemed doomed to obscurity from the start.
The MSI Claw 8 AI+, however, feels like a much more accomplished product right from the off. It's a substantial piece of kit, with a chonky chassis that immediately delivers a sense of weight and quality the second you get it in your hands. The Hall effect thumbsticks are well-placed, the triggers and shoulder buttons feel much improved, and overall it's a good-looking, desirable object to pull from the box. As it should be, for the fairly substantial price of $900/£899.
Sitting centre stage is an 8-inch IPS-type 1200p display, and it's noticeably vibrant from the moment you boot into Windows. While the Claw 8 AI+ is not the most portable of machines, everything external has a certain wow factor that the previous model was sorely missing—and that big screen sits proudly in the middle, begging you to dive in.
Inside there's plenty to be excited about, too. It comes equipped with the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, a Lunar Lake chip that we've been anticipating in a handheld gaming PC for a long time.
CPU: Intel Core Ultra 7 285V
Cores: 4x Performance, 4x Efficient
Threads: 8
GPU: Intel Arc 140V
Memory: 32 GB LPDDR5x-8533
Screen size: 8-inch
Native resolution: 1920 x 1200
Refresh rate: 120 Hz
Storage: 1 TB SSD
Battery: 80 Wh
I/O: 1x MicroSD card reader, 2x Thunderbolt 4 (Displayport/Power Delivery 3.0)
Dimensions: 299 x 126 x 24 mm
Weight: 795 g
Price: $900/£899
Intel had a rough 2024 when it came to desktop CPUs, but the Lunar Lake mobile chips stood out as perfect candidates for a portable gaming machine—thanks to excellent power efficiency and an improved, Battlemage-based Arc 140V iGPU, with eight Xe² cores and eight dedicated ray tracing units.
Not that smooth ray tracing performance was ever on the table
Read more on pcgamer.com
