How much do you love high-end PC gaming on the go? Can you put a price on that love? Is that price $1,800? If so, MSI has the handheld for you: the Claw 8 EX AI+, an all-powerful addition to the Taiwanese manufacturer’s Claw range.
It’s unusual to lead a review on price, but at that figure, it dominates the discussion. It’s so expensive that it makes the premium ROG Xbox Ally X, which I knocked for its $1,000 MSRP, look like a bargain. You could buy three regular ROG Xbox Ally units for the price of one MSI Claw 8 EX AI+. It even blows past the launch price of the Lenovo Legion Go 2, a previous contender for “most expensive handheld” with its then-$1,350 MSRP.
The Claw 8 EX AI+’s price isn’t (purely) due to the greedy jaws of capitalism gnashing down on poor, innocent gamers. Like everything else in tech this year, the extraordinary sum is down to the AI bubble constraining component supplies and driving up prices even on existing hardware (the aforementioned Lenovo is now close to $2,000). An MSI spokesperson confirmed this, telling me the MSRP was “based on component and production cost considerations.” When a gaming handheld is as powerful as this, those components don’t come cheap.
Portable Powerhouse #
So, what do you get for your nearly two grand? Quite the beast. The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ (hereafter referred to as the Claw) is a flagship for Intel’s powerful new Arc G3 Extreme chips. It packs a whopping 32 GB of LPDDR5x RAM, 1 terabyte of SSD storage, and an 8-inch 1920 x 1200 IPS touchscreen with a 120-Hz variable refresh rate (VRR), all powered by a massive 80-watt-hour battery.