MSI Claw A1M Lands at Retail in USA

[T0@st]

MSI's official North American online store has started to sell their brand-new Claw A1M handheld portable gaming PC—earlier in the week media outlets spotted a premature Newegg store listing, perhaps foreshadowing a widespread US launch on March 8 (today). MSI appears to be staggering the Claw's rollout across the global markets—late last month, German customers were treated to "early" pre-order access thanks to de-store.msi.com listing the basic model (Handheld CLAW A1M-036), with units declared as being "in stock." US customers are similarly limited to the entry level "052US" SKU—the region's MSI store official launch day price sits at $699.00. This model sports an Intel Core 5 135H "Meteor Lake" processor, and 512 GB of internal storage.

Newegg has relisted the three MSI Claw A1M variants, albeit with a revised release date of March 15—interested parties can pre-order the Core Ultra 7 + 1 TB SSD version for $799, or MSI's middle-of-the-pack Core Ultra 7 + 512 GB model for $749. Newegg's product page for the basic Core Ultra 5 + 512 GB SSD configuration bears the same $699 price tag as seen on MSI's official store listing. We are not entirely sure whether Western embargoes have been lifted to coincide with today's North American launch—a trickle out of English language evaluations could occur next week. Chinese review outlets have been experimenting with press samples since mid-February.



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[Space Lynx]

not sure why steam is the only one to place the right analog stick in same place as left analog stick, but that is the style I prefer. I hate bending my thumb a little backwards to reach the lower right analog stick.

 

[ToTTenTranz]

It just launched with zero reviews.. meaning no review units were sent to anyone.

I guess Intel only paid MSI enough to make a big fuss back at CES, and then MSI just forgot about it. Even this thing's dedicated subreddit is pretty much empty.

 

[bonehead123]

They can have my money when they can CLAW it from my cold, dead hands !

 

[Cheeseball]

I just got mine. It is slightly slower in Apex Legends compared to the ROG Ally at locked 15W TDP. However, if you run Apex in DX12 mode, it seems to be a more consistent 60+ FPS since it is still an Arc GPU. Testing was done in the firing range for now.

This is on the latest 31.0.101.5333 WHQL driver.

I have not done a battery test yet, but I have lost 20% after a little but more of 20 minutes of running around.

Sticks are better than the ROG Ally for sure. No drift even when set to 0% deadzone/capacity in Apex.

EDIT: Ultra 7-155H (8 Xe cores) with 1 TB

 

[Space Lynx]

I just got mine. It is slightly slower in Apex Legends compared to the ROG Ally at locked 15W TDP. However, if you run Apex in DX12 mode, it seems to be a more consistent 60+ FPS since it is still an Arc GPU. Testing was done in the firing range for now.

This is on the latest 31.0.101.5333 WHQL driver.

I have not done a battery test yet, but I have lost 20% after a little but more of 20 minutes of running around.

Sticks are better than the ROG Ally for sure. No drift even when set to 0% deadzone/capacity in Apex.

EDIT: Ultra 7-155H (8 Xe cores) with 1 TB

how easy is to change the watt usage per game? that's one thing I love about steam Deck, I can do it in under 5 seconds for any game, its really fast, like I played FFX HD Remaster at 4 watts and the battery lasted ages. only took me 5 seconds to dial it in, as soon as I did 3 watts the fps counter in real time would dip. so that's how I knew.

 

[Cheeseball]

how easy is to change the watt usage per game? that's one thing I love about steam Deck, I can do it in under 5 seconds for any game, its really fast, like I played FFX HD Remaster at 4 watts and the battery lasted ages. only took me 5 seconds to dial it in, as soon as I did 3 watts the fps counter in real time would dip. so that's how I knew.

Just set it and forget it within MSI Center M. It's similar to Armoury Crate SE and LegionSpace. If anything it may be considered easier since its easy to set PL1/PL2 on most Intel CPUs (e.g. ThrottleStop/Intel XTU).