MSI Claw Gaming Handheld Leaks Ahead of CES

MSI looks to be the next company to be launching a new handheld gaming PC. The company started teasing the new device on social media yesterday, but the name of the device, the first official marketing pictures, and its specs have apparently leaked on X/Twitter (via Videocardz). The device is named the MSI Claw, and it looks quite similar to Valve’s Steam Deck or the Asus ROG Ally.

The leaked specs from Geekbench reveal an Intel “Meteor Lake” Core Ultra 7 CPU with 16 cores under the hood, which is interesting. The latest gaming handhelds on the market, the Asus Rog Ally and the Lenovo Legion Go, both use AMD Ryzen Z1 Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). Valve’s Steam Deck, however, comes with a custom “Aerith” APU based on AMD’s older Zen 2 and RDNA2 CPU and GPU architectures.

Intel’s new Core Ultra mobile CPUs introduce more powerful Arc GPUs with up to 8 Xe cores, and it remains to be seen how they compare with AMD’s integrated GPUs, which are usually better than Intel’s. The leaked specs on Geekbench also indicate 32GB of memory, which is double the amount of what other handheld gaming PCs currently offer. However, maybe MSI could have another model of the Claw with just 16GB of memory.

A whole new breed of MSI dragon is coming.
Get a grip and stay tuned.#MSIxCES2024 #RGB #Gaming pic.twitter.com/W9mp2cDo9w

— MSI Gaming (@msigaming) January 4, 2024

CES officially starts next week on January 9, so we won’t need to wait much longer to get more details about the MSI Claw. While Windows 11 isn’t really optimized for gaming handhelds yet, it’s great to see increased interest from PC manufacturers for this form factor. And while AMD’s Z1 chips are specifically designed for gaming handhelds, it will be interesting to see if Intel’s new Meteor Lake mobile chips are competitive.