I love the MSI Claw A8, but its price proves PC handhelds are officially going off the rails — here’s why – 1v1 Video Chat & LIve Streaming & Influencer Subscription

By Jason England

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MSI Claw A8 packs an AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme — the rumors were true

A new MSI Claw gaming handheld has just been spotted — and it may finally give me the chance to ditch Intel for AMD

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Now I know gaming handhelds can be expensive, but if we’re at a point where they could be vastly more expensive than vastly more powerful gaming laptops, something’s gone wrong here.

If you want my personal recommendations on what to get instead, tap here to jump on down to those (including some tasty Prime Day deals). But for those of you who want more context on what just got revealed, let’s talk about it.

MSI Claw A8 First Look | Beats ROG Ally 2 to the Punch! – YouTube

A surprising spec reveal doesn’t save it

(Image credit: Future)
Everything seems largely the same as what I tested at Computex — giant 80Wh battery, all the same ports, a 1200p display (which we now know has a 500-nit peak brightness). But seeing WiFi 7 is a surprise.
Previously, MSI confirmed to me that this was rocking WiFi 6E, so for online gaming, this has now become an altogether stronger machine. I’m a big fan of that.

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That doesn’t take away from the inflationary pressure being felt by this potential price. Of course, there will be a variation . We’re talking about the price in China here, with one version coming with the government’s 15% subsidy, and the higher price including sales tax.
But with the current global climate, I dare say that we could see that price go up. For example, the Intel-based MSI Claw 8 AI+ is priced the same as this AMD counterpart in China.
The MSRP over here is $999, and when you take into account just what kind of gaming hardware you could get for a thousand bucks, that’s where I start to fear that PC gaming handhelds are going off the rails. And it makes me especially nervous about the ROG Xbox Ally X.
What should you buy instead?

(Image credit: Future)
The simple answer is get a gaming laptop. But allow me to go into both scenarios here:

If I could tempt you towards a gaming laptop: If ultra portability is something I can sway you on, a gaming laptop like the MSI Thin A15 with RTX 4060 is a great shout at $40 less. Or if you want to save even more money, you could get the HP Victus with RTX 4050 for $699 (and based on my testing, you can still get games looking pretty on here).
If you are settled on a handheld and nothing else: You’ve got two options in my mind (neither of them are the Steam Deck, as that’s getting a little too old now). First, you can find some decent prices on the Asus ROG Ally with Ryzen Z1 Extreme. And second, the Lenovo Legion Go S with SteamOS is a great shout! Both are over $300 less.

MSI Thin (RTX 4060): was $1,199 now $959 at Newegg
Don’t let that 0.9-inch thinness deceive you — the MSI Thin is a powerful beast with AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS, RTX 4060 GPU, 16GB of super fast DDR5 RAM and a spacious 1TB SSD. Pair that with a 15-inch 1080p 144Hz display for fluid gaming and you’ve got a stellar system at its cheapest ever price.

HP Victus 15 (RTX 4050): $699 at Amazon
Inside, you get an Intel Core i5-13420H CPU, RTX 4050, 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512GB SSD. This is enough to run AAA games at 1080p medium settings and squeeze 60 FPS out of them.

(Image credit: Future)
In my hands-on time with the MSI Claw A8, I talked about how pricing being unknown makes me a bit nervous. Looking at the decent performance gains with AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme in a bubble of not thinking about cost was impressive, but the price tag has to be fair.
And put simply, if this pricing translates the way I’m thinking over to the U.S. and U.K., this ain’t it. Handheld gaming does come with a premium, I get that. But not this kind of premium.
If the Steam Deck proved anything, it’s that you can get surprisingly impressive gaming performance from lower power (and lower cost) internals. And I can only cross my fingers and hope that $1,000 doesn’t become the new defacto standard for handhelds.
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Jason England

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Managing Editor — Computing

Jason brings a decade of tech and gaming journalism experience to his role as a Managing Editor of Computing at Tom’s Guide. He has previously written for Laptop Mag, Tom’s Hardware, Kotaku, Stuff and BBC Science Focus. In his spare time, you’ll find Jason looking for good dogs to pet or thinking about eating pizza if he isn’t already.

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