How much do you love high-end PC gaming on the go? Can you put a price on that love? Is that price $1,800? If so, MSI has the handheld for you: the Claw 8 EX AI+, an all-powerful addition to the Taiwanese manufacturer’s Claw range.

It’s unusual to lead a review on price, but at that figure, it dominates the discussion. It’s so expensive that it makes the premium ROG Xbox Ally X, which I knocked for its $1,000 MSRP, look like a bargain. You could buy three regular ROG Xbox Ally units for the price of one MSI Claw 8 EX AI+. It even blows past the launch price of the Lenovo Legion Go 2, a previous contender for “most expensive handheld” with its then-$1,350 MSRP.

The Claw 8 EX AI+’s price isn’t (purely) due to the greedy jaws of capitalism gnashing down on poor, innocent gamers. Like everything else in tech this year, the extraordinary sum is down to the AI bubble constraining component supplies and driving up prices even on existing hardware (the aforementioned Lenovo is now close to $2,000). An MSI spokesperson confirmed this, telling me the MSRP was “based on component and production cost considerations.” When a gaming handheld is as powerful as this, those components don’t come cheap.

Portable Powerhouse

Photograph: Courtesy of Matt Kamen

So, what do you get for your nearly two grand? Quite the beast. The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ (hereafter referred to as the Claw) is a flagship for Intel’s powerful new Arc G3 Extreme chips. It packs a whopping 32 GB of LPDDR5x RAM, 1 terabyte of SSD storage, and an 8-inch 1920 x 1200 IPS touchscreen with a 120-Hz variable refresh rate (VRR), all powered by a massive 80-watt-hour battery.

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

It’s all crammed into a “Void Purple” shell that impresses with a premium feel. An etched micro-texture offers a secure grip, while the Xbox-standard control layout is within easy reach for most players, although the four menu and system buttons flanking the screen may require a stretch. Analog sticks (encircled with LED light halos, naturally) and shoulder triggers are built with Hall effect sensors for improved accuracy and long-term resilience and offer a nice degree of resistance when pressed. The chunky, angular D-pad feels great too, although its concave shape may take a moment to get used to, and its glossy plastic picks up microscratches easily.

Although it’s running Windows 11 under the hood, the full-screen Xbox Mode takes the lead, giving a unified view of games installed from any storefront. The Claw lacks a dedicated Xbox system button, but with two mappable rear grip buttons, it’s easy enough to assign one. Given that you can install any other client, I set the other as a Steam menu button, useful for shortcuts when running Steam’s Big Picture Mode.

Despite the Claw’s 785-gram heft, its ergonomics and weight distribution compensate wonderfully. It outweighs both the Steam Deck and the ROG Xbox Ally X, but I found it much more comfortable to use, even for protracted play sessions. Advanced haptics also impress, with a nice sense of feedback accurately representing on-screen action.

The screen is great, but not amazing. The IPS panel delivers a crisp, clear image with brightness up to 500 nits, but at this price, I’d hope for an OLED panel to make colors really pop. That 120-Hz VRR ensures a smooth image at least, and the 16:10 aspect ratio gives a subtle but noticeable bit more real estate to your games.

I wasn’t initially a fan of the screen extending below the “shell” of the unit, but it’s a clever design, serving as a kickstand to let the handheld stand vertically. This is surprisingly useful if you want to connect the device to an output dock for TV play. I used an OWC Thunderbolt Go dock, and while it’s not as elegant or secure as sliding a Nintendo Switch 2 into its caddy, it means the Claw can fit neatly into a media unit. Just pair a game controller and you’re good for big-screen gaming.

Arc de Triomphe

Photograph: Matt Kamen

The real star of the Claw is Intel’s new Arc chipset, which delivers phenomenal results. The Arc G3 Extreme is built around Intel’s Panther Lake architecture, which offers a massive performance increase over the preceding Lunar Lake chips. It’s significantly faster than pretty much any other chip in a PC handheld, and Intel’s XeSS—Xe Super Sampling, its answer to Nvidia’s DLSS or AMD’s FSR—can improve performance further with smart upscaling and frame generation.

The result is that the Claw offers notably better performance than the ROG Xbox Ally X—although some fiddling with settings may be required. On Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered in handheld mode, with graphics settings at High, I could get 90 to 120 frames per second (fps) with XeSS enabled at full 1920 x 1200 resolution, with no discernible impact on latency. Docked and outputting to a 4K OLED TV, I managed to get a reliable 60 fps at 4K resolution.

Performance varied on a few other demanding games. Crimson Desert yielded about 65 fps without XeSS—entirely playable and a testament to the handheld’s power—but well over 100 fps with the feature enabled. Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight surprisingly turned out to be the most volatile title tested; with settings at High played in handheld mode, I got roughly 100 fps with XeSS on, but as low as 20 fps during speedy driving sections of the game. Docking the Claw for TV output again, it nosedived to an unplayable five frames per second, although I suspect that’s more down to the game’s poor optimization.

You’ll get the absolute best performance when the Claw is plugged in, but even running off battery, the Claw impresses. The downside is battery drain. Despite that colossal 80-watt-hour cell, those power-hungry, AAA games tore through a full charge in around 90 minutes. Thankfully, you can easily switch between power profiles in the MSI Quick Settings menu and manually tinker with output limits.

The Endurance Mode power setting is the most impressive. It limits output to 30 fps (by default; dive into Intel’s Graphics Software and you can adjust it to 40 or 60 fps, at the cost of more power draw) and cuts out XeSS, but drastically extends battery life. It also doesn’t seem to diminish performance massively—that troublesome Lego Batman actually seemed to run smoother in Endurance Mode than otherwise, and I was getting upward of four hours on it between charges. On less demanding games—a mix of Vampire Survivors, Dave the Diver, and Cassette Beasts—I got well over eight hours before needing to plug in.

Pick a Lane

Photograph: Matt Kamen

The Claw’s biggest problem might be its being a Windows PC at heart. That definitely has advantages: Unlike on the Steam Deck, you don’t need to worry about whether a game is verified; you can install mods easily and even use it as a regular PC if you hook up a monitor. However, it also brings all the frustrations the OS is known for, magnified by being applied to a handheld.

As with the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds, constant updates are a nightmare. Almost every time I turned the Claw on, I’d have to spend ages running updates—system updates, security updates, app updates through the Windows Store, game updates, game client updates, on and on—before actually playing anything. Navigating the actual Windows desktop when needed is fiddly too, despite a “Desktop Mode” control scheme, where the thumbstick moves the mouse cursor. Worse, Microsoft’s Gaming Copilot is still baked into the Xbox app—it’s been rebranded “Game Assist” as Microsoft seems to be trying to hide from Copilot’s terrible reputation, but it’s still useless.

It also suffers from a stack of competing interfaces. Xbox Mode wants to be the default, while Steam’s Big Picture mode could be set in its place if that’s where all your games are. But MSI takes a stab at it with its own Claw Center M.

This could be the best, most console-like option—a unified home screen that presents every installed game as clear, chunky tiles with striking background wallpapers and provides easy access to some deeper system settings. Unfortunately, it’s buggy. The dedicated button to activate Claw Center, similar to pressing the Home button on the Switch 2, tends to flash the app, then immediately return to whatever was being done beforehand. Sometimes this also interferes with controls, locking you out when you go back to your game. A tap of the touchscreen corrects this, but there were a few occasions when I had to restart the whole rig.

Claw Center is also only an overlay—navigating it continues to move the cursor around whatever you were doing before. By the time you’ve finished whatever you were doing, you’ve probably wound up on some Steam forum page or accidentally launched an entirely different game. Hopefully, some of those endless updates can patch out these issues.

Despite the clutter, the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ offers some of the best overall performance you’re likely to experience on a gaming handheld. In normal times, it would be an easy recommendation for players wanting top-class gaming on the go, and a serious contender for PC play on the TV. Unfortunately, to justify that painful price, it needed to be perfect, a sublime and unassailably brilliant experience, and it doesn’t quite hit that threshold. Those with the deepest pockets will get a lot out of this, but anyone else will want to think carefully before committing.