MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ Review: Arc G3 Extreme Takes The Handheld Crown

MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ Noise And Thermals

MSI has a lot of experience engineering cooling solutions for laptops and mobile devices, but it doesn't seem like the firm changed much in that regard since the last Claw 8. That's actually just fine, because the previous-gen Claw 8 was essentially inaudible under normal conditions and had amazing thermal performance. The Arc G3 Extreme has a higher power limit than Lunar Lake did, though, and we do see some higher temperatures. First, the noise reading:


This measurement was taken with the microphone sitting at a distance of about 18 inches from the handheld, which approximates a reasonable distance from the device to your head while you're holding it. As you can see, it barely makes any noise at all. The machine was running Cyberpunk 2077 while this measurement was taken, and yet there's nearly nothing to be heard from the fans. They're audible, in a quiet room, but only just so; if you have HVAC or a fan blowing nearby, you'll never, ever notice it. So how's the cooling?


Not stellar, but "good enough." This measurement was, again, taken while playing Cyberpunk 2077, and the chip does indeed get pretty warm while loading those big Cougar Cove CPU cores. However, it never exceeded its thermal limit on the cores, and while we did see a brief bit of package/ring thermal throttling, that was actually while the game was compiling shaders, not during gameplay. In the end, the thermals of this machine are fine, and if you're really concerned, you can use MSI Center M to manually crank up the fan speed if you like.

MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ Battery Life

You might notice a distinct lack of charts in this section. That's because these tests are still running. At the time of this writing, the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ has been running a video playback battery life test for several hours; if it continues on its current pace, it'll be done sometime tomorrow. Yes, really.

We did some informal battery gaming tests and the results were nothing short of astonishing. An hour of playing indie "bullet heaven" title HoloCure dropped the battery by a little over 8%. If the game continued with that rate of drain, you could potentially be playing HoloCure for upwards of 12 hours on the Claw 8 EX AI+. We're going to get some more empirical and targeted gaming battery life results, but first the battery video test has to finish. Check back tomorrow and we should have some interesting data for you.

UPDATE: We have the battery life results! They're as good as promised. First, the ever-popular PCMark battery video test, which consists of playing an HD video with audio on loop while the brightness is calibrated to 115 nits, or as close as possible. For this machine, that meant a 27% brightness level. Note that, as is our normal practice, we have fully disabled Microsoft's Energy Saver on this system, so this is representative of full power draw right to the end.


Yep; this handheld has now set our highest battery life result ever, at 1478 minutes, or 24 hours and 38 minutes. It shouldn't really be surprising when you think about it. IPS LCDs are very efficient, and while the 8" screen on the Claw 8 EX is relatively large for a handheld gaming system, it's quite small compared to your average laptop. With Panther Lake's efficiency and the large 80-Whr battery, this result was a foregone conclusion. But what about gaming?


Because we were trying to get these numbers out as fast as possible, we didn't run as many gaming battery benchmarks as we would like, but this should still give you a reasonable idea of the kind of battery life you can expect from this machine. It's not world-beating, but it's very close, and you have to keep in mind that this chip is delivering consistently higher performance than the AMD processors; we were testing Cyberpunk 2077 in "RT Ultra" mode and getting around 90 FPS with XeSS Frame Generation.

When you apply a framerate cap, as we did in 30XX using Intel Endurance Gaming, power consumption falls off a cliff and battery life becomes extreme. We stopped testing 30XX at 8 hours because the reviewer's old, arthritic wrists were giving out. Suffice to say that the power efficiency of the Arc G3 Extreme and the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ are such that, when playing lightweight games, you are almost certainly going to get tired before the machine does, and that's incredible.

MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ Gaming Handheld Review Conclusions

There are basically three tiers of gaming handhelds. On the bottom you have low-cost devices, often based on Arm processors running Android, and at the top tier you have luxurious devices with Ryzen AI Max+ processors and exotic features. The mainstream tier is mostly where the x86-based gaming handhelds live, and historically the price point for those devices has been, broadly, between $500 and $1000, with a few outliers above and below that range.

We're talking about pricing right up front because it does shape the conversation somewhat around this new MSI handheld. There's no question that we're happy to report about the truly 'extreme' performance of the Arc G3 Extreme SoC, the tight Hall-effect controls, the sharp IPS screen, or the awesome battery life of this device. Conversely, the reality is that the MSI Claw EX AI+ currently costs $1799, and that likely puts it out of reach for some people who might be interested in it.

This obviously isn't entirely on MSI. The current PC market is an unfavorable place to launch a new product; just ask Valve about the pricing on its Steam Machine. This system has 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, which happens to be the type seeing the greatest demand right now. It also has an extremely advanced SoC built with bleeding-edge manufacturing and the most advanced packaging in the world, courtesy of Intel.


Even allowing for some wiggle room for the state of the market, it's a bit difficult to justify the $1799 price of the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+. Don't get us wrong; it's a brilliant device and we're thoroughly impressed with it and its performance. It's just that, for the same money, you can walk down to Best Buy and buy a Lenovo Legion Go 2 with a higher-resolution OLED screen and detachable controls, albeit with admittedly lower performance. Alternatively, for $999, you could get an ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X with the same performance deficit, comparatively. It's true that both of those are slower and less efficient than this machine, but it really comes down to what you value most in a handheld PC.

We should also mention that, while the price has gone up considerably since launch, you could have purchased a GPD Win 5 with a Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD for the same price as this system. The Win 5 is currently available for just north of $2,400, which is about a $600 increase over launch. Comparatively, the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is more than double the price of the previous 8" Claw at $900 more. An unfair comparison? Perhaps, and the new Claw still has its advantages over the Win 5, particularly in terms of efficiency and battery life. It doesn't make the pricing of the Claw 8 EX AI+ sting any less, though.

All of that said, if you want a no-compromises PC gaming handheld, there's nothing else on the market right now that offers this machine's combination of performance and efficiency. We wish it didn't command such a high premium, but there are certainly some of you out there for whom an $1800 purchase for a device like the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ isn't an issue. If you don't mind the pricing, there's really nothing else to say. Head on over to Best Buy and place your order before they're all gone. All other factors being equal, the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ would be my personal choice of gaming handhelds.