The MSI Claw is an embarrassment

No one should buy MSI Claw. Technically, it’s not broken: the first 7-inch Intel Core Ultra portable gaming PC doesn’t crash regularly or anything like that. But the Claw is so far behind the competition that it’s effectively dead on arrival.

In almost every way, the $750 MSI Claw feels like an inferior Asus ROG Ally clone — except it costs more, not less! You can get a much better experience and save hundreds of dollars by going with the Steam Deck OLED instead.

I spent weeks looking for silver. In the end, I found only three tiny ways Claw improves on the competition.

I didn’t start my MSI Claw journey with benchmarks. My expectations were already at an all-time low, so I started with a lighter test: making the Claw my daily driver for the less intense games I already played on other PDAs. I ran the PC port of Studio Ghibli No No Kuni, Diver Daveand Fallout New Vegas — a game that is almost 14 years old.

Each one runs smoothly on the $549 OLED Steam Deck. Neither ran smoothly on the $749 MSI Claw. They stuttered or lagged even when the system told me they were hitting 60fps or higher, and despite a 48-120Hz variable refresh screen that was supposed to smooth things over. Claw also lost frames when the deck remained stable and delivered less frames.

So I ran some more repetitive tests. How bad is the Intel Core Ultra 155H really compared to the competition? Here’s a look:

In case your jaw hasn’t hit the floor yet, let me do it for you: the less expensive Steam Deck OLED pretty much wiped the floor with the MSI Claw. and productivity.

The Claw, set to full power and plugged into the wall for turbo boost, ran some games slower than my Steam Deck on a single battery. You can imagine paying two hundred dollars more for games like this Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 45fps instead of 60 — and only when you’re plugged into a wall?

Compared to Windows gaming laptops, the Claw fared no better, with rivals Asus ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go offering between 10 percent better performance and above double performance depending on the game and power mode.

There was one bright spot: Reverse, one of the most intense PC games I’ve tried, actually worked better on Claw than Deck or Ally. But not good enough to play… and when I sat down to play for an hour each Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Cyberpunk 2077, I didn’t find them playable either. Both games are playable on Steam Deck, ROG Ally, and Lenovo Legion Go at the same (low) settings, so there’s no excuse for the Claw to be an unstable mess.

I even ran 3DMark Time Spy and Fire Strike to see if MSI might have accidentally sent me a lemon, but nope—my Claw scored slightly higher than MSI’s own internal benchmark. And yes, I ran these tests on Intel’s latest graphics driver, which should have provided big improvements, rather than the one the Claw originally shipped with.

At least Claw doesn’t seem to have any worse battery life than its Windows counterparts. MSI gave it a 53 watt-hour battery, slightly larger than the Legion Go and much larger than the Ally, and I saw about the same 1.5 hours Shadow of the Tomb Raider for charging. I have 2 hours and 25 minutes Fallout New Vegas and reached a maximum run time of 4 hours and 19 minutes Balatro, one of the least demanding games I’ve played on a PDA. (My first run lasted 3.25 hours; I got an extra hour by setting the system to Super Battery mode and aggressively dimming the screen.)

But compared to the Steam Deck OLED, which can easily last twice as long Balatro and allowing Larry Croft to raid tombs for over two hours isn’t very good—and I have no idea how MSI can justify its marketing claim that the Claw “runs 50 percent longer” than a regular handheld.

It should be noted that MSI did put a decent amount of thought into Claw’s UX. While equipment can to look as Asus ROG Ally’s budget Batman edition, which has the same button layout and nearly identical curves, it might feel a little better in the hands. I appreciate its larger knobs, more substantial buttons on the face, and Hall-effect joysticks and triggers for durability. Like the Ally, the Claw has some of the best speakers on a gaming handheld, complemented by surprisingly good Nahimic virtual surround sound, which echoed beautifully around me when I couldn’t get deep into the tombs.

I really wish MSI hadn’t adopted a stiffer but sloppy D-pad or added so many unnecessary spikes to its air vents – they’ve repeatedly prevented me from finding the charging port in a dark bedroom. Claw’s roar is also terrifying. At least MSI lets you disable it!

But the main thing I’d like to rule out is Windows.

It’s been almost a full year since Asus released the ROG Ally, and more than two years since the Steam Deck was released, but Microsoft hasn’t done anything significant to make its operating system more screen-friendly with a gamepad. I could pretty much copy/paste my criticism from the ROG Ally review: I ran into the same issues when calling up virtual keyboards and playing games, things that mostly run on Steam Deck despite its Linux underpinnings and/or with – for them.

And I ran into sleep problems very similar to those I saw with the Lenovo Legion Go: I just can’t trust that this laptop won’t wake itself up if I put it down or throw it in my bag. Only here it’s a bit worse because MSI Center has a tendency to hang when I wake up – sometimes disabling my gamepad’s controls until I restarted it.

While MSI Center also hides important features like remapped controls, I like that it includes launchers for every major PC gaming platform, comes with a bunch of handy shortcuts that work right out of the box (such as the switch, which turns off RGB lighting) and is relatively fast. At launch, Deck, Ally, and Legion Go had more buggy and sluggish interfaces.

Today, however, they’re all much more feature-rich and all allow you to install updates yourself—whereas Claw still expects you to go to MSI’s website and download the critical parts manually, or wait for Windows Update to deliver the goods.

MSI claw does not appear the worst gaming laptop I’ve ever touched. Years ago I played with some that weren’t even worth reviewing, handhelds so poorly designed and limited in the market that I didn’t feel the need to warn you. But stores like Best Buy do have the MSI Claw — and in the current crop of competing portables, it’s the worst buy of all.

Photo by Sean Hollister/The Verge