Disassembly

Removing the bottom cover includes unscrewing six Phillips-head screws and then carefully lifting off the bottom lid.

The massive 80 Wh battery and the dual-fan cooling setup dominate the assembly. Each thumbstick has a daughterboard that you must remove and disconnect from the main motherboard to replace the analogue sticks, which isn't a significant issue since the Claw 8 features drift-free Hall effect thumbsticks.


The SoC is cooled by two thick heatpipes, each ending in a fairly large heat sink (for a handheld PC). The two fans are competent and, as you'll see later, are virtually inaudible in most situations. The single 2230 NVMe slot is housing a 1 TB drive made by Kioxia.


The SSD used is Kioxia BG6 KBG60ZNS1T02, featuring a PCIe 4.0 x4 connection, NAND flash made by Kioxia, and an SM2268XTF SSD controller from Silicon Motion, which is most likely an SM2268XT revision. The SSD doesn't have a DRAM cache, but it does feature HMB (64 MB).

Unfortunately, you won't be able to see the chip itself this time because the Claw 8 is the latest addition to our handheld game testing suite, and thus we didn't want to risk anything happening to it during a full teardown.