MSI Claw 7 AI+ Lunar Lake Gaming Handheld Is Now Available To Preorder
MSI's maiden Claw handheld was competent, but likely less compelling to cautious consumers when confronted by AMD-powered competitors boasting beefier performance and better battery life. That largely mirrors the reality of comparing Intel's Meteor Lake against AMD's Phoenix in gaming laptops. What about Lunar Lake, though?
If you're out of the loop, Intel's newer Core Ultra 200V-series processors (codenamed "Lunar Lake") matched up well against AMD's current generation "Strix Point" SoCs and beat the pants off of the red team's last-generation "Phoenix" parts. That includes the Ryzen Z1 Extreme, the SoC powering most of the Claw's competitors, like the ROG Ally and the Legion Go.
Left: MSI Claw 8 AI+, Right: MSI Claw 7 AI+
And so, naturally, MSI has a new generation Claw handheld ready to go. Two, in fact; the MSI Claw 7 AI+ appears to be a revised version of the original Claw handheld, now sporting a much better Core Ultra 7 258V SoC, while the MSI Claw 8 AI+, which we wrote about before, is a larger model that gets a few key upgrades. Here are the specifications, alongside other big-name handhelds.
For the MSI Claw 7 AI+, the big upgrade is really just the Lunar Lake chip itself. The Core Ultra 258V will probably lose out to the Core Ultra 155H found in the last-generation Claw if you were to compare multi-threaded productivity benchmarks, but gaming handhelds are not for doing that kind of work. The 4P+4E configuration of Lunar Lake is much more appropriate for a handheld, and the extremely high single-threaded IPC of Lion Cove is perfectly suited for task.
The MSI Claw 8 AI+ is a new model featuring a larger, higher-resolution screen and a huge 80-Whr battery. That should give it battery life in the same ballpark as the ASUS ROG Ally X, although naturally it will vary a lot depending on the workload. It also gets an upgrade to 1TB of storage. There will probably be models that offer less SSD space, though, as we know that there will also be machines available with the 16GB Core Ultra 7 256V instead of the 32GB Core Ultra 7 258V. (The memory is on-package, you see.)
Both machines' I/O. Not exactly to scale.
The Arc 140V GPU in the Core Ultra 200V parts is a leap forward from the very middling Arc GPU built into the Core Ultra Series 1 chips. We fully expect that these versions of the MSI Claw should be broadly competitive with the latest machines including the OneXFly F1 Pro and the Ayaneo 3, both of which are based on AMD Strix Point hardware. If you're feeling confident, you can go ahead and pick up a Claw 7 AI+ right now at Amazon; pre-orders are available for $799 and expected to launch on Sunday.
