Introduction

MSI is one of the world's largest PC component vendors, offering a wide range of products, including motherboards, graphics cards, mini PCs, laptops, monitors, cases, coolers, and pre-built gaming desktops. The company even sells gaming chairs. So it's not surprising that MSI recently decided to enter the handheld gaming PC waters. Their first offering, the MSI Claw A1M, didn't leave a big mark. Does its successor, the Claw 8 AI+, fare better?



Unlike most of its competitors, the Claw 8 isn't powered by an AMD chipset. Instead, it utilizes an Intel Lunar Lake chip, which consists of a Core Ultra 7 258V CPU featuring 4 performance cores and 4 efficient cores, as well as an Intel Arc 140V iGPU based on Intel's Battlemage (Xe2) architecture. The APU is paired with 32 GB of lighting-fast LPDDR5X 8533 MT/s on-package memory.

Other specs include a massive 120 Hz, 8-inch screen with VRR support, 1 TB of PCIe 4.0 SSD storage, a microSD card slot, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, a chunky 80 Wh battery, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a capable dual-fan cooling solution, and lots of RGB. Before we move on, we'd like to thank MSI for providing the review sample.