The MSI Claw is ready to come to the market as early as this week.
As reported by VideoCardz, a listing on the online retailer NewEgg shows that they will be releasing one SKU of the Claw as early as this Friday, March 15, 2024. The two other SKUs will be arriving a week later.
These are the SKUs, prices, and release dates, according to NewEgg:
- MSI Claw A1M: Core Ultra 7 155H, 1 TB SSD: $ 799 Release Date: March 15, 2024
- MSI Claw A1M: Core Ultra 7 155H, 512 GB SSD: $ 749 Release Date: March 8, 2024
- MSI Claw A1M: Core Ultra 7 135H, 512 GB SSD: $ 699 Release Date: March 15, 2024
While it’s somewhat curious that the middle tier is getting the early release, this may be MSI anticipating that this SKU will be the most popular. Even the cheapest tier clears the border on the high end of gaming devices, twice the cost of the Nintendo Switch OLED.
What MSI may be expecting is that most of their customers, who can afford these devices to begin with, will buy the model with the most high end CPU core, but the lowest amount of storage. They will then upgrade that themselves with the highest amount of storage they can get their hands on.
Whichever tier you choose, Intel claims both their Core Ultra 7 135H and 155H are at a power level higher than AMD can deliver for the MSI Claw’s competition. The Steam Deck OLED has a custom 6 nm Sephiroth, while the ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go have the Ryzen Z1 or Z1 Extreme.
We won’t get into the comparisons for these handhelds here, of course, as there are a group of influencers and also mainstream gaming press eager to make those tests themselves. We do know, based on testing for the Core Ultra 7 135H and 155H, that Intel’s claims they can outdo the competition are at least credible. But, there’s a high likelihood that Intel will outperform on some games and applications, but not consistently across all of them.
It will all depend on how well MSI optimizes use of those chips on both the hardware and software side of the Claw. And, there are even other devices coming up in the near future that will also use these new Core Ultra chips. So MSI has to deal with competition from them, too.
But whichever way you look at it, all this competition between the chip manufacturers, and the companies making these gaming handhelds, is great for the consumer. They will attempt to outdo each other fiercely, and along the way give us the best gaming experiences they can come up with. If you add in the broader mainstream success of the Switch, gaming handhelds have never been in a better place than they are now.
