Thanks for the video! Yeah this is disappointing. It looks like Intel made a bad choice here on a chipset. Either that or there is some optimization needed. I don't get how they can mess up on this project so badly. I wonder how this handheld would run under Linux with the Steam OS on it in comparison. It would be interesting to see.
I am most interested in the Ultra 5 for my kids after the price drops to the Z1. Could you test the Ultra 5 with the Sonic games and Ryujinx, specifically Zelda and MarioKart 8? Could you compare it to the Z1? Do you have any tips on how to configure this device for kids, e.g., windows settings or Steam? The Claw (Microcenter) and Ally Z1 (Bestbuy) are available with accidental damage warranties. The SteamDeck is not. Performance plugged in is relevant since long flights and EVs all support high-wattage USBC.
this is a lie because you can put in the estatics wich amount of W is really consuming Steam deck and you hide that, i have a steam deck but if you limit the TDP to 15w aniways the game will get what it needs 20W, 22, 25w limit to 15 TDP its only a range, but arent 15w for real, put the stats info complete battery and W steam deack shows that
@@ThisHandleIsNotAvailable. The Steam Deck at launch did had issues yet in the beginning Elden Ring ran better on the Steam Deck than on the PC. This makes sense as Asus and intel wants to sell hardware while Valve aim was to sell software.
It's cuz proton makes it translate to Vulkan and a majority of ER's issues at launch (and arguably still half of them exist today) are from DX12, so getting rid of DX12 and translating to Vulkan = smooth. This happens with a lot of DX12 games that have similar issues, they run great on the deck lol. DX12 is so awful 😆 it reminds me how disasterous DX10/10.1 was back in the day
The steam deck pretty much had the best battery life out of handhelds mostly due to it custom Linux that doesn’t have a lot of shit running in the background
@@robertcastanpn288Yeah, I'm not bagging on the OLED by the way. It's incredible the performance you can get for just 15W. I just tested my Legion Go at the same settings in CP2077 and got 67 FPS average @ 30 W and 52 FPS average @ 15W. The Claw can't even beat a chip that's two generations old with double the power, nuch less the current gen AMD chips. Intel/MSI have a lot of work to do.
@@robertcastanpn288It's a factor, sure. But you're not likely to see a dramatically different experience if you installed the SteamOS on any of these windows handhelds, even accounting for whatever optimizations are possible.
What's more impressive are the steam decks oleds temperatures whilst matching the claws performance. Nearly 20°C at times. Matching performance with alot more battery life in the bank.
Intel's asymmetric core design is bad for gaming, especially because the windows scheduler can't make sense of the difference between P, E, and LPE cores. It would be interesting to see if you could disable the ultra 7 down to 4 P cores and see if it performs better since more of the TDP would be available for the GPU.
It just makes it clear that the 22 threads it has is useless because no games are using more than 16. Hell I would argue even 8 threads is enough. Intel scaling down a desktop cpu to fit into a handheld is ill advised.
Not true about windows scheduler on asymmetric cores for a long while. W10 was the last to have troubles but w11 is built with asymmetric designs in mind. In contrast Windows have trouble with AMD heterogenous like processors due to 3D vcache, zenc variants of the same core.
I was looking up the Claw to see what I retail for here in Sweden……the cheapest version is 1000$! Yes you read that correctly, it’s 1000$ and I believe the 155 is 1100$. I paid 650$ for my Steam Deck OLED 512 including shipping so this is just insane. For comparison the ROG Ally is about 750$ here for the extreme and 600$ for the base model Z1. So I think that the Claw is going to have a pretty rocky launch in Europe and I’ll be surprised if that hefty price tag will remain for long…..
@8bitchiptune420 my net salary is $1630 after 34% tax. Given that I like to eat and have a roof above my head... 🤣 but as I said an AMD version would benefit all us gamers, cheaper and better drivers 👍🏻
@@Xenotesterpaid them enough to take the biggest L in handheld history? It’s like this thing was made without testing any games or optimisation before release 🤷🏽♂️
The Steam Deck OLED is the most balanced gaming PC handheld. It has the right balance between battery life, performance, features, ergonomics and ease of use. It's also the best value. I had a ROG Ally which I would have kept if I thought it was the better handheld overall, but while I did quite like it I still found that I preferred the Steam Deck OLED as a whole. The thing is, the Ally did have better performance when using higher TDP settings, but I noticed that the Steam Deck OLED performed very well in most games anyway. And in the few games where I felt like the Steam Deck wasn't giving me the kind of experience I wanted the ROG Ally wasn't really doing so either. These are high end games that I prefer to play on my desktop PC. And to really take advantage of the better performance you're going to have to run at higher TDP, which means in practice you're mostly going to have to be plugged in. When I'm out making deliveries for my job I have moments of free time that I can play my handhelds, but I don't have access to a power outlet. So, really, I'm only going to be able to plug in at home. But then at that point I'm either going to want to play on my powerful desktop PC or can simply stream to my Steam Deck OLED and have extremely long battery life and be in any part of the house. There's simply no use case for me where the somewhat better performance of the Ally makes much of a difference. Especially not against the longer battery life, better ergonomics, better community, superior features and ease of use of the Steam Deck.
Steam Deck's performance shows like a magic. Regardless of how beefy the specs of MSI Claw, it still outperformed with SD's very optimized hardware. I just bought a base 64gb LCD version of SD and this video signifies that my purchase is totally a steal deal. Thanks Valve for your generosity towards us gamers.
I also noticed that my Steam Deck OLED has more consistent/stable frame times than the ROG Ally. There's definitely something very special about how Valve tuned the Steam Deck. I learned long ago with my desktop graphics cards that frame time consistency is more important than absolute framerate. Your average might be higher on one card, but if the frame times fluctuate a lot it's not going to look or feel good, even with a VRR display.
@@cyberedge881 your comment makes me more appreciate SD. I was on the crisis of choosing for either ally or SD, but my wallet cries to SD 😅. So far I have no regrets. Happy gaming!
Go ahead and disable 10 cores out of 16 tbh... this is what happens when no thought is put into how to make a handle, just an OEM order to cram stuff together.
@@FrostArchon Yeah and windows handhelds are more usable than linux systems and games run even very old ones on win11 but steam deck is very robust and affordable starts from 350$ and can be microsofted.
@@skyhighsunlightwindows handheld are on average just worse than the Steam deck at running games. The only advantage is compatibility, specially in multiplayer games.
@@bandito241 But all games are created with windows software how are they worse if linux cant natively run anything only with emulation or adaptation. Any native linux games you know other than mobile games like standoff or pubg or mobile legends?
I bought oled deck last month comming from ally and legion go steam deck is a beast and when it comes to battery and screen.I can get 4 hours of playtime in d4 and last epoch on medium with 45 fps capped and 90hz and 10 tdp and it’s super smooth
People that preordered directly from msi are still waiting for msi to get the claw to their warehouse to ship out. I was told that the claws have been held on a shipping dock for the past 2 weeks and that hopefully this week they will be released to msi. Anyone else that preordered directly from msi getting told the same thing?
I don't see the point of the Claw in the current market. It trades blows with the SD, but with a higher price tag and no OLED screen. And from what I've seen the Ally largely wipes the floor with the Claw, and is also at a lower price point.
Nah. Intel died a while ago. I'll keep my Steam Deck OLED. This console changed my entire play experience and is making quick work of my Steam Backlog!. I am really happy with my purchase 😊 every hardware needs great software and support behind it to be successful. That's why the Steam Deck wins 😊
Proof that Power Efficiency is what makes a handheld superior, not just in performance, but also in portability Nothing else could match the Steam Deck OLED at 15W or less
here in Hungary its no brainer. The Claw with the Ultra 7 costs almost 2x as much. Maybe the Ultra 5 is the best version of the Claw, but thats still 1.5x in price. I dont know whats going on with the pricing, maybe Intel cpus are more expensive, but the Claw is the Intel version of the Ally. One thing is sure, Valve really made a banger with the Deck, especially with the Oled one.
Valve can sell them at a loss since they will get their cut from all the Steam games you buy. All the other companies like MSI don't get that option and have to profit from the hardware alone.
@@Soapy_PapooseWe also don't actually know if Valve is selling them at a loss. All we have on that topic is the knowledge that they could, and that they said the 64GB LCD model was "painful" to hit price-wise.
@@Soapy_Papoose yes they can, because the steam deck is a handheld console, like the Nintendo switch, the rest are PCs (their main store is Steam, which means those make money for Valve too)😂😂💀💀.
No trackpad + Windows = hell on earth. With just 6 E-cores (so 6 cores 6 threads) and using the saved die space on a bigger iGPU I think Intel could still be a contender in this space, but using a high-end laptop chip (from any company) in a handheld is a fool's errand IMO. If these ever go on clearance I might buy one to use as a... I dunno, honestly. 22 threads cooled by a tiny fan... anything that's going to actually use those cores is going to be bottlenecked by heat.
16 cores in a portable system like this is ridiculous. 95% of games don't use more than 4 cores, so why pack all that in there? Just give it a 6-core cpu, optimize battery life and software, and you have it. Intel graphics aren't the worst, and they're always getting better... but the CPU is stupid. IDC if most of those Intel cores are E cores, they aren't necessary.
Yeah totally, what practical use does this have - outside of a flex on the spec sheet? Even for a 'future proofing' reason, it makes no sense as by the time games are multithreaded to the point they benefit from 16 cores... they rest of the system will be bottlenecked. The only reason I have a 16 core cpu on my main PC is because I have to compile things for work... so I guess it makes sense for a very small subset of people that want to also use this as a desktop replacement to compile heavy tasks?
@@toploaded2078I see that on a spec sheet and make sure to AVOID that product! that amount of cores means less power to the few cores that will be useful (in theory). I don't want to have to disable cores in BIOS to get all the performance tuned right. I barely wanted 8 cores on my desktop at home because I do mostly gaming with SOME video editing and code compiling at home. But most of that stuff I do on my work machine which is more tuned for that sort of stuff. But this type of device is not capable of being a desktop replacement for people doing that kind of work. It's just an ultra-light alternative. Which is fine, but 99% of people will never need that. And according to every review so far, it's showing how much of a drawback those extra cores are, even if they are E or LPE cores.
Crazy to see the massive differences in cpu clocks between the two. They are rarely equal. In tomb raider, deck is 1.5 and claw is 3.3, but in red dead deck is 3 and claw is 2. Its like the power management for the claw is completely backwards
@etaprime did I miss this - was the Steam Deck testing using SteamOS/wine vs MSI Claw in Windows? I wonder if this variance could have significantly affected results.
Thanks for the comparison! Something I’d like to request in maybe a follow up video, is including another category of comparison which is the Steam Deck at a lower wattage. I still don’t know how Valve did their black magic, but I almost always keep my Deck at either 9 or 11 watts and I get the majority of the performance still.
Having played RDR2 and HZD all the way through on the Steam Deck, I can say they are more than playable. For ~300 more, I just don't see why folks would want the Claw. If you want more power than the deck, and have more $ to spend, just get the ROG Ally or something similar.
At least the Ally has more performance at the top end and similar performance at the 15 TDP area. The Claw makes no sense. If it had similar performance it would have at least had USB 4.0 vs the Ally excluding VRR. Some people even prefer a dark color. I really hope Intel fix their drivers.
@@maynnemillaresfor me if was how infuriating it is to use Windows on a handheld. Configuration is truly horrible. Great hardware gimped by a dog turd of a user experience.
@eta prime Really appreciate you trying out new game benchmarks vs. the old ones you typically do. Looks like the MSI needs some serious optimizations, along with some new Intel drivers.
The whole launch of this device has felt wrong - no preview units going out to reviewers like yourself, a premium price point, that only works if this device was significantly faster than an ROG Ally/ Legion GO and it was released in a state where it can't beat out the steam deck performance. My Claw arrives tomorrow and it's the least excited i've been for any of the handhelds I own. I am a positive person, the steam deck, ally and go all had serious issues at launch and i'm hoping that with bios/driver updates (And youtubers like yourself trying out core disabling) we will end up with something that performs reasonably.... I could just be living in cloud cuckoo land though :)
It goes to show that Valve is really treating their Steam Deck like a true console. They have been optimizing so much on Linux to get as much performance as possible out of their hardware, that's awesome! MSI and Intel might get there someday, but Intel has a long ways to go for their gpu drivers. Would be interesting to see if Valve's methods are slowly getting other companies to look into Linux someday.
Steam Deck just rules, so well done and optimised, Valve have worked and worked on it making it better and better. Will the same support be offered from Asus or MSI etc? Plus that OLED is gorgeous.
In a few months the Ally will be a year old, Asus will just sell a new iteration and forget the original. Asus is a hardware business, while Valve is a software company.
AMD has been making gaming chips for some time now so it's no surprise they have superior hardware. It's good to have something that resembles competition though.
The Steam Deck OLED is amazing. Valve are pulling some magic over at HQ. There's a reason so many of us with powerful gaming PC's and next Gen consoles still prefer to play on the Deck most of the time. With the OLED refresh, they basically solved any major gripe someone might have with it. When we get a Steam Deck 2 with a much faster SoC and as frame generation continues to improve, it will be truly amazing. Would love to see a ASUS ROG XG Mobile style setup from Valve in the future. I like Asus but Valve could absolutely kill it on the optimization front. I'd happily replace my desktop in that case.
For Horizon on the OLED Deck everything set to medium but textures set to high running the benchmark : At 15 tdp I got 62 fps , at 12 tdp = 58 fps and at 10 tdp = 53 fps. At 8 tdp the framerate drop to 43 fps. 10-12 tdp is ideal for most game on the Oled deck.
Graphics drivers these days are basically a collection of ad hoc optimizations for specific games. Intel Arc drivers do not contain yet enough of those and, hence, are not competitive currently. The large number of cores can’t help this as CPUs can’t replace a struggling GPU and most games simply do not employ so many threads.
The Deck is just unbeatable for the price, performance, and battery life. It amazes me that 2 years later the Deck is still outperforming newly released handhelds that use much more power.
It’s a bit of a shame, I’d like to see more competition in the handheld space but MSI was just too late imo. It will take 6+ months of updates to catch up to the Rog Ally and by then the Rog Ally 2 will be out. I also don’t know why they didn’t offer higher ram options since it’s using an IGPU. Lots of questionable choices in the end I suppose.
Its great to see the interest in the handheld systems at this point Valve has done it best in my opinion. I love my Steamdeck Oled perfect for my type of gaming.
now im not an expert on how cpus and gpus work but 20-30 watts of power seems really low for a 16 core cpu. the maximum wattage for this chip is 115W in order to get the correct speeds advertised. my guess is that the components in the claw just arent getting enough power to perform the best they could. i could be wrong but its just a big observation i noticed. also of course intel arc drivers still arent quite optimized yet so all that hardware just isnt being used efficiently
Desktop and mobile optimized processors are different. The desktop variants do not need to worry about power, while the mobile ones are designed to save battery when possible. In this case I think it is Intel's first attempt to create an APU (processor and graphic card combined), while AMD did this several times already. On top of this they software of the SD is very well designed and fits the APU, while this is not the case for the MSI which uses Windows 11, a very overloaded OS. My desktop CPU (Ryzen 7 7700X) is also not really power hungry. The most it consumed so far was 110 watts. I do not know about the latest Intel processors though.
Truth be told, I was expecting a LOT more out of this MSI Claw (even on the higher end one), I have been following this in detail from the announcement. When you talk about price point, the OLED deck is, what like $250 less than the MSI Claw? This is Intel's first shot at this. I was expecting a lot more from Intel after having a few years looking over what the Deck offered. Personally, the Claw is a joke right now. In this price point your looking at the Ally, or even the Legion GO and we all know they are both more powerful than the Deck. Maybe it will get better over a few months but, I can't see it blowing away the deck (maybe get closer) but, don't even think it would be close to the Ally, or the Go. Intel screwed this one up for sure. If things don't get better, I'll grab one of the 155H models when they are on clearance for like $300 just to keep in the car or something or make it a dedicated emulation device.
The only way to salvage the MSI Claw at this point is total removal of Windows and be replaced by a SteamOS alternative like ChimeraOS, while forcing the MSI Claw's APU to operate with just 15 watts or lower. Right now, MSI and Intel found themselves in a hole, as they didn't do their homework.
Somehow I knew before the video started that the Steam deck would be KING. I do have a few of these pc handhelds, but the MSI did not pass the smell test for me. What makes the Steam Deck so good is that it has less of those buzz words....like a lot of cores and threads. It does not have to spread all that power around to so many cores. It just utilizes the ones it already has efficiently.
Why would a company release a system in such condition? Of course all of these handhelds release with issues, that get corrected with updates(Steam Deck, Ally, etc.). But this is DOA at this point, as the price is high and everyone has seen the bad performance, and how much can updates truly fix this performance? The amount of time, money and R&D just seems all like a HUGE waste, as who is this for?
It all comes down to the fundamental chip architecture. In this case, Intel is years behind AMD, and their roadmap suggests possibly even close to a decade. Things like stutter can be fixed, and you could maybe see some modest gains of 10-20% if the drivers can be optimized, but overall, it's just DOA.
I'd love to see the same benchmarks on the MSI claw, but running something like Nobara in Gamescope session mode. Not trivial to set up - but not that hard either. I have so little use for Windows on these types of devices (or any devices for that matter).
hey eta, i know this is off topic but, i was wondering if you might do a video with the msi claw vs the Anbernic win600 16gb model currently anbernic have this discounted so I was wondering from a price-to-performance comparison ? as you have both handhelds could be interesting just wondered what you thought
For the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmarks to compare I ran my Ally at the Steam Deck settings but at 1080p and FSR Quality instead of Balanced and I got an average of 33FPS at 18w with a minimum of 28.6FPS. So that completely destroys the Claw since that is slower at a lower resolution and more power consumption. At 30w the Ally does 39.2FPS and a minimum of 33FPS. My Ally is running Bazzite for context and it would be interesting to see if the Claw is any better under Linux.
Sadly, I would not pick either one of these. I want an OLED handheld that can run Windows in HDR (Steam Deck OLED only supports HDR in SteamOS). Of course, I wrote Special K, so HDR is very important to me and not being tied to Steam's DRM is a big plus too. The current crop of handhelds just isn't the full package. MSI could have knocked it out of the park if they included an OLED. Hopefully ASUS steps up to plate eventually, they have the most OLED laptops of any manufacturer, so it's surprising they have not yet.
From what I understand OLED are expensive to engineer. The Switch and Deck Oled were already engineered and there is no 7-8 inch landscape OLED. (tablets and phones uses portrait displays) If Asus used a portrait OLED display for Ally 2 and the Ally fans would be crying because it wouldn't have VRR support. HDR on the PC is behind and inferior compared to consoles. If you want good HDR you better stick with the PS5. I think some PC games look worst with HDR.
Checks out. Intel chips perform much better with more power behind it. I thought it was interesting MSI chose to put it in a handheld. I still think it's too early to tell, though. Most handhelds are subpar right after the release date. (Including the o.g. steam deck) I'm interested to see what kind of support MSI is going to bring to the table with optimizations and what not.
These two cpus are like 14900K and a 7800X3D, the Intel sometimes gets a few frames more, but for double and more power usage, and this is a ( gaming handheld where power is limited and shared with the gpu, and for gaming you don't need 16c/22t. The gpu on the claw will never have enough power available.
Good video glad you showed this off, this why the Deck OLED to me still is the goat. Best price to performance ratio and the battery life is ❤️ idk what's up with MSI lmao those Intel chips are too hungry
Let's be real, as long as no one dares create some kind of real good optimized supported os like the steamdeck, all of thoses super high end performance will be wasted. Man the msi claw with steam os would break all of the records
So Yeah let me know your thoughts on the MSI Claws performance here. Looking like it might have not been ready for release. 🤔
Thanks for the video! Yeah this is disappointing. It looks like Intel made a bad choice here on a chipset. Either that or there is some optimization needed. I don't get how they can mess up on this project so badly. I wonder how this handheld would run under Linux with the Steam OS on it in comparison. It would be interesting to see.
Why not have compared the 3 handhelds ... Steam deck vs ROG Ally (after updates) vs MSI Claw Utra 155?
Hey, nice test, try to do something different, turn off 12 cores, match it to the steam deck and see if there are any changes.
I am most interested in the Ultra 5 for my kids after the price drops to the Z1. Could you test the Ultra 5 with the Sonic games and Ryujinx, specifically Zelda and MarioKart 8? Could you compare it to the Z1? Do you have any tips on how to configure this device for kids, e.g., windows settings or Steam? The Claw (Microcenter) and Ally Z1 (Bestbuy) are available with accidental damage warranties. The SteamDeck is not. Performance plugged in is relevant since long flights and EVs all support high-wattage USBC.
this is a lie because you can put in the estatics wich amount of W is really consuming Steam deck and you hide that, i have a steam deck but if you limit the TDP to 15w aniways the game will get what it needs 20W, 22, 25w limit to 15 TDP its only a range, but arent 15w for real, put the stats info complete battery and W steam deack shows that
The fact that the Deck is beating the Claw at a lower power and having to run an additional translation layer is astounding.
And the Deck is 2 years old
@@ThisHandleIsNotAvailable. The Steam Deck at launch did had issues yet in the beginning Elden Ring ran better on the Steam Deck than on the PC. This makes sense as Asus and intel wants to sell hardware while Valve aim was to sell software.
sometimes the translation layer helps
@@smidlee7747yeah Elden ring at launch was running smooth on the steam deck or PS4 Elden ring running through PS5
It's cuz proton makes it translate to Vulkan and a majority of ER's issues at launch (and arguably still half of them exist today) are from DX12, so getting rid of DX12 and translating to Vulkan = smooth. This happens with a lot of DX12 games that have similar issues, they run great on the deck lol. DX12 is so awful 😆 it reminds me how disasterous DX10/10.1 was back in the day
Ouch. The Steam Deck just curb stomped the Claw. That's embarassing. Not just the performance, but the battery life too.
The steam deck pretty much had the best battery life out of handhelds mostly due to it custom Linux that doesn’t have a lot of shit running in the background
@@robertcastanpn288Yeah, I'm not bagging on the OLED by the way. It's incredible the performance you can get for just 15W. I just tested my Legion Go at the same settings in CP2077 and got 67 FPS average @ 30 W and 52 FPS average @ 15W. The Claw can't even beat a chip that's two generations old with double the power, nuch less the current gen AMD chips. Intel/MSI have a lot of work to do.
@@robertcastanpn288It's a factor, sure. But you're not likely to see a dramatically different experience if you installed the SteamOS on any of these windows handhelds, even accounting for whatever optimizations are possible.
@@robertcastanpn288 You can do a custom version of windows too, like XOS. Warning, it's extremely stripped.
@@robertcastanpn288 very power efficient apu on top of that
Finally a solid and direct comparison. Congratulations. Steam Deck is truly impressive in terms of efficiency.
After seeing these numbers I think MSI Claw should be renamed to the MSI Paw.
MSI Mittens :)
MSI DECLAWED
@yourtubisfilled7164 but that makes it sound cute, which ruins it's appeal to gamers with more money and refusal to research than sense.
MSI Claw more like MSI Nah
MSI Flaw
Missed opportunity. Could've just said "Naw" 😂
More like MSI Clown
Not like it was msi fault...it's intel apu still lacking behind in driver.
that pun is so bad 😂 the replies are so much better. lol
I'm shocked. respect to the deck
I'm not. Nothing beats the Deck.
The first comparison of the two I’ve seen Thank you !
What's more impressive are the steam decks oleds temperatures whilst matching the claws performance. Nearly 20°C at times. Matching performance with alot more battery life in the bank.
60°C vs 80°C. 20°hotter for 10-20fps less.
Intel's asymmetric core design is bad for gaming, especially because the windows scheduler can't make sense of the difference between P, E, and LPE cores. It would be interesting to see if you could disable the ultra 7 down to 4 P cores and see if it performs better since more of the TDP would be available for the GPU.
MSI should do that by default, shouldn’t they?
It just makes it clear that the 22 threads it has is useless because no games are using more than 16. Hell I would argue even 8 threads is enough. Intel scaling down a desktop cpu to fit into a handheld is ill advised.
Fully agree!
Not true about windows scheduler on asymmetric cores for a long while. W10 was the last to have troubles but w11 is built with asymmetric designs in mind. In contrast Windows have trouble with AMD heterogenous like processors due to 3D vcache, zenc variants of the same core.
@@HolyRamanRajyaIf that were even the LEAST bit true then the intel application optimizer wouldn't need to exist.
I was looking up the Claw to see what I retail for here in Sweden……the cheapest version is 1000$! Yes you read that correctly, it’s 1000$ and I believe the 155 is 1100$. I paid 650$ for my Steam Deck OLED 512 including shipping so this is just insane.
For comparison the ROG Ally is about 750$ here for the extreme and 600$ for the base model Z1. So I think that the Claw is going to have a pretty rocky launch in Europe and I’ll be surprised if that hefty price tag will remain for long…..
Om vi bara kunde få en Claw med AMD istället 😅 billigare och bättre drivers
Bro is complaining about $1000 in Sweden. This thing is about 2 months salary in where I live 😂
@8bitchiptune420 my net salary is $1630 after 34% tax. Given that I like to eat and have a roof above my head... 🤣 but as I said an AMD version would benefit all us gamers, cheaper and better drivers 👍🏻
Where I'm at(Pittsburgh)the non extreme is $400 and the extreme is $600. I'm picking up my ally on Friday
1000$ in sweden is not much
The only upgrade the Claw can do is in next version to have an AMD APU instead of an Intel one.
This is probably going to sell so bad that the handheld department will be dissolved. 🤷🏽♂️🤦🏽♂️😅
@@BarelyAverageDude I'm sure intel paid msi for making this device
@@Xenotesterpaid them enough to take the biggest L in handheld history?
It’s like this thing was made without testing any games or optimisation before release 🤷🏽♂️
or intel needs to step up their drivers
@@BarelyAverageDude That's worse than a WiiU launch 🤣
Daaaaamn maaan! Steam Deck is a beast! ahahha
Also notice that Deck has no tearing and claw has horrible tearing going on
The Steam Deck OLED is the most balanced gaming PC handheld. It has the right balance between battery life, performance, features, ergonomics and ease of use. It's also the best value. I had a ROG Ally which I would have kept if I thought it was the better handheld overall, but while I did quite like it I still found that I preferred the Steam Deck OLED as a whole.
The thing is, the Ally did have better performance when using higher TDP settings, but I noticed that the Steam Deck OLED performed very well in most games anyway. And in the few games where I felt like the Steam Deck wasn't giving me the kind of experience I wanted the ROG Ally wasn't really doing so either. These are high end games that I prefer to play on my desktop PC.
And to really take advantage of the better performance you're going to have to run at higher TDP, which means in practice you're mostly going to have to be plugged in. When I'm out making deliveries for my job I have moments of free time that I can play my handhelds, but I don't have access to a power outlet. So, really, I'm only going to be able to plug in at home. But then at that point I'm either going to want to play on my powerful desktop PC or can simply stream to my Steam Deck OLED and have extremely long battery life and be in any part of the house. There's simply no use case for me where the somewhat better performance of the Ally makes much of a difference. Especially not against the longer battery life, better ergonomics, better community, superior features and ease of use of the Steam Deck.
Steam Deck's performance shows like a magic. Regardless of how beefy the specs of MSI Claw, it still outperformed with SD's very optimized hardware. I just bought a base 64gb LCD version of SD and this video signifies that my purchase is totally a steal deal. Thanks Valve for your generosity towards us gamers.
I also noticed that my Steam Deck OLED has more consistent/stable frame times than the ROG Ally. There's definitely something very special about how Valve tuned the Steam Deck.
I learned long ago with my desktop graphics cards that frame time consistency is more important than absolute framerate. Your average might be higher on one card, but if the frame times fluctuate a lot it's not going to look or feel good, even with a VRR display.
@@cyberedge881 your comment makes me more appreciate SD. I was on the crisis of choosing for either ally or SD, but my wallet cries to SD 😅. So far I have no regrets. Happy gaming!
Same, I got a 64gb lcd deck with 128gb sd card and have no issues for what I play
Go ahead and disable 10 cores out of 16 tbh... this is what happens when no thought is put into how to make a handle, just an OEM order to cram stuff together.
I mean the case is a lot like the ROG Ally, they might use the same manufacter
The MSI Claw is extremely inefficient. New Intel iGPUs are not ready to take on AMD, it seems.
But it gives more fps.
@@skyhighsunlight Might as well get the ROG Ally then. More fps than claw and much cheaper.
@@FrostArchon Yeah and windows handhelds are more usable than linux systems and games run even very old ones on win11 but steam deck is very robust and affordable starts from 350$ and can be microsofted.
@@skyhighsunlightwindows handheld are on average just worse than the Steam deck at running games. The only advantage is compatibility, specially in multiplayer games.
@@bandito241 But all games are created with windows software how are they worse if linux cant natively run anything only with emulation or adaptation. Any native linux games you know other than mobile games like standoff or pubg or mobile legends?
Valve did good with the dedicated silicon
_Efficiency vs Raw Power_
Steam Deck is still the *fastest handheld on the market. *ᶜᵒⁿˢᶦᵈᵉʳᶦⁿᵍ ᵖᵒʷᵉʳ⁻ᵗᵒ⁻ᵖᵉʳᶠᵒʳᵐᵃⁿᶜᵉ ʳᵃᵗᶦᵒ
Unfortunately not surprised at all to be honest
I bought oled deck last month comming from ally and legion go steam deck is a beast and when it comes to battery and screen.I can get 4 hours of playtime in d4 and last epoch on medium with 45 fps capped and 90hz and 10 tdp and it’s super smooth
Maybe just for those two games you play those do not requir high fps😂
true but epoch and d4 looks amazing on legion... everything is so much easier to read
@@overoula everything is clear on mine too just don’t use the in game fsr and use deck it’s own fsr it looks way better and sharper
@@amigoz3201 they're coping, new aaa games gonna run at 10-15 fps on the deck compared to the other handhelds, will be a diaster
People that preordered directly from msi are still waiting for msi to get the claw to their warehouse to ship out. I was told that the claws have been held on a shipping dock for the past 2 weeks and that hopefully this week they will be released to msi. Anyone else that preordered directly from msi getting told the same thing?
everyone who preordered should cancel and ask for refund since MSI lied on lot of things !
I don't see the point of the Claw in the current market. It trades blows with the SD, but with a higher price tag and no OLED screen.
And from what I've seen the Ally largely wipes the floor with the Claw, and is also at a lower price point.
Worthy of note: The firmware has seen huge improvements since this review, we're talking upwards of 40% boosts in some cases.
Worth a revisit!
Nah. Intel died a while ago. I'll keep my Steam Deck OLED. This console changed my entire play experience and is making quick work of my Steam Backlog!. I am really happy with my purchase 😊 every hardware needs great software and support behind it to be successful. That's why the Steam Deck wins 😊
Amd is miles ahead with the tech! Any chance to test the MSI Claw with Chimeraos?
Forget the Claw. Get a Deck.
Just as I expected. Intel hasn't yet solved their power consumption issue. And here, even at double TDP, it still sucks.
Proof that Power Efficiency is what makes a handheld superior, not just in performance, but also in portability
Nothing else could match the Steam Deck OLED at 15W or less
Ya
Dang, I was really looking forward to the Claw. Also, that OLED on the deck looks so much better. Maybe some updates will help the Claw.
Nope. Nothing can help it. Steam Deck rules.
im even more in love with my oled deck
this is a testament to what valve has done with optimizations i cant wait for a more powerful steamdeck.
here in Hungary its no brainer. The Claw with the Ultra 7 costs almost 2x as much. Maybe the Ultra 5 is the best version of the Claw, but thats still 1.5x in price. I dont know whats going on with the pricing, maybe Intel cpus are more expensive, but the Claw is the Intel version of the Ally. One thing is sure, Valve really made a banger with the Deck, especially with the Oled one.
Valve can sell them at a loss since they will get their cut from all the Steam games you buy. All the other companies like MSI don't get that option and have to profit from the hardware alone.
@@Soapy_PapooseWe also don't actually know if Valve is selling them at a loss. All we have on that topic is the knowledge that they could, and that they said the 64GB LCD model was "painful" to hit price-wise.
@@Soapy_Papoose yes they can, because the steam deck is a handheld console, like the Nintendo switch, the rest are PCs (their main store is Steam, which means those make money for Valve too)😂😂💀💀.
This is exactly what I expected. Intel isn't there yet for performance per watt.
im so glad i bought the steam deck 2 weeks ago
This is one of the best showcases of how vitally important optimization is.
No trackpad + Windows = hell on earth. With just 6 E-cores (so 6 cores 6 threads) and using the saved die space on a bigger iGPU I think Intel could still be a contender in this space, but using a high-end laptop chip (from any company) in a handheld is a fool's errand IMO. If these ever go on clearance I might buy one to use as a... I dunno, honestly. 22 threads cooled by a tiny fan... anything that's going to actually use those cores is going to be bottlenecked by heat.
16 cores in a portable system like this is ridiculous. 95% of games don't use more than 4 cores, so why pack all that in there? Just give it a 6-core cpu, optimize battery life and software, and you have it. Intel graphics aren't the worst, and they're always getting better... but the CPU is stupid.
IDC if most of those Intel cores are E cores, they aren't necessary.
Yeah totally, what practical use does this have - outside of a flex on the spec sheet? Even for a 'future proofing' reason, it makes no sense as by the time games are multithreaded to the point they benefit from 16 cores... they rest of the system will be bottlenecked. The only reason I have a 16 core cpu on my main PC is because I have to compile things for work... so I guess it makes sense for a very small subset of people that want to also use this as a desktop replacement to compile heavy tasks?
@@toploaded2078I see that on a spec sheet and make sure to AVOID that product! that amount of cores means less power to the few cores that will be useful (in theory). I don't want to have to disable cores in BIOS to get all the performance tuned right.
I barely wanted 8 cores on my desktop at home because I do mostly gaming with SOME video editing and code compiling at home. But most of that stuff I do on my work machine which is more tuned for that sort of stuff.
But this type of device is not capable of being a desktop replacement for people doing that kind of work. It's just an ultra-light alternative. Which is fine, but 99% of people will never need that. And according to every review so far, it's showing how much of a drawback those extra cores are, even if they are E or LPE cores.
Crazy to see the massive differences in cpu clocks between the two. They are rarely equal. In tomb raider, deck is 1.5 and claw is 3.3, but in red dead deck is 3 and claw is 2. Its like the power management for the claw is completely backwards
@etaprime did I miss this - was the Steam Deck testing using SteamOS/wine vs MSI Claw in Windows?
I wonder if this variance could have significantly affected results.
I guess it's going to require a mini-PC form factor with beefy heatsink to see the full potential of Core Ultra.
Thanks for the comparison!
Something I’d like to request in maybe a follow up video, is including another category of comparison which is the Steam Deck at a lower wattage.
I still don’t know how Valve did their black magic, but I almost always keep my Deck at either 9 or 11 watts and I get the majority of the performance still.
Having played RDR2 and HZD all the way through on the Steam Deck, I can say they are more than playable. For ~300 more, I just don't see why folks would want the Claw. If you want more power than the deck, and have more $ to spend, just get the ROG Ally or something similar.
The Ally is not a deal for me, given the sdcard slot is frying like french fries.
At least the Ally has more performance at the top end and similar performance at the 15 TDP area. The Claw makes no sense. If it had similar performance it would have at least had USB 4.0 vs the Ally excluding VRR. Some people even prefer a dark color. I really hope Intel fix their drivers.
The deal breaker for the Ally is its problematic sdcard slot.
@@maynnemillaresfor me if was how infuriating it is to use Windows on a handheld. Configuration is truly horrible. Great hardware gimped by a dog turd of a user experience.
Great video. For the battery test, I think you should leave both screens with the same nits, something like 400nits and 400nits
Fun fact: Valve actually used Aperture Science for the Steam Deck.
@eta prime Really appreciate you trying out new game benchmarks vs. the old ones you typically do. Looks like the MSI needs some serious optimizations, along with some new Intel drivers.
optimization wont really fix hardware limitation
So who is the target audience for msi claw? Why would someone pick this over a rog ally/steam deck? Is this just doa?
The whole launch of this device has felt wrong - no preview units going out to reviewers like yourself, a premium price point, that only works if this device was significantly faster than an ROG Ally/ Legion GO and it was released in a state where it can't beat out the steam deck performance. My Claw arrives tomorrow and it's the least excited i've been for any of the handhelds I own. I am a positive person, the steam deck, ally and go all had serious issues at launch and i'm hoping that with bios/driver updates (And youtubers like yourself trying out core disabling) we will end up with something that performs reasonably.... I could just be living in cloud cuckoo land though :)
It goes to show that Valve is really treating their Steam Deck like a true console. They have been optimizing so much on Linux to get as much performance as possible out of their hardware, that's awesome! MSI and Intel might get there someday, but Intel has a long ways to go for their gpu drivers. Would be interesting to see if Valve's methods are slowly getting other companies to look into Linux someday.
Steam Deck just rules, so well done and optimised, Valve have worked and worked on it making it better and better. Will the same support be offered from Asus or MSI etc? Plus that OLED is gorgeous.
In a few months the Ally will be a year old, Asus will just sell a new iteration and forget the original. Asus is a hardware business, while Valve is a software company.
AMD has been making gaming chips for some time now so it's no surprise they have superior hardware.
It's good to have something that resembles competition though.
My ROG Ally 🤝 My Steam Deck
Glad I did not dump one in favor of ordering this.
Steam Deck OLED is still an overall king of handhelds 👑 Valve and AMD has cooked some magic there
The Steam Deck OLED is amazing. Valve are pulling some magic over at HQ.
There's a reason so many of us with powerful gaming PC's and next Gen consoles still prefer to play on the Deck most of the time. With the OLED refresh, they basically solved any major gripe someone might have with it.
When we get a Steam Deck 2 with a much faster SoC and as frame generation continues to improve, it will be truly amazing. Would love to see a ASUS ROG XG Mobile style setup from Valve in the future. I like Asus but Valve could absolutely kill it on the optimization front. I'd happily replace my desktop in that case.
For Horizon on the OLED Deck everything set to medium but textures set to high running the benchmark : At 15 tdp I got 62 fps , at 12 tdp = 58 fps and at 10 tdp = 53 fps.
At 8 tdp the framerate drop to 43 fps. 10-12 tdp is ideal for most game on the Oled deck.
Graphics drivers these days are basically a collection of ad hoc optimizations for specific games. Intel Arc drivers do not contain yet enough of those and, hence, are not competitive currently. The large number of cores can’t help this as CPUs can’t replace a struggling GPU and most games simply do not employ so many threads.
The Deck is just unbeatable for the price, performance, and battery life. It amazes me that 2 years later the Deck is still outperforming newly released handhelds that use much more power.
It’s a bit of a shame, I’d like to see more competition in the handheld space but MSI was just too late imo. It will take 6+ months of updates to catch up to the Rog Ally and by then the Rog Ally 2 will be out. I also don’t know why they didn’t offer higher ram options since it’s using an IGPU. Lots of questionable choices in the end I suppose.
Its great to see the interest in the handheld systems at this point Valve has done it best in my opinion. I love my Steamdeck Oled perfect for my type of gaming.
Hi, the processor with all those cores is overkill and looks forward to see what happens when you park some of those cores.
An actual review. Yes!!! Thank you.
now im not an expert on how cpus and gpus work but 20-30 watts of power seems really low for a 16 core cpu. the maximum wattage for this chip is 115W in order to get the correct speeds advertised. my guess is that the components in the claw just arent getting enough power to perform the best they could. i could be wrong but its just a big observation i noticed. also of course intel arc drivers still arent quite optimized yet so all that hardware just isnt being used efficiently
Desktop and mobile optimized processors are different. The desktop variants do not need to worry about power, while the mobile ones are designed to save battery when possible. In this case I think it is Intel's first attempt to create an APU (processor and graphic card combined), while AMD did this several times already. On top of this they software of the SD is very well designed and fits the APU, while this is not the case for the MSI which uses Windows 11, a very overloaded OS.
My desktop CPU (Ryzen 7 7700X) is also not really power hungry. The most it consumed so far was 110 watts. I do not know about the latest Intel processors though.
Dang, hope the Claw gets better with driver updates! Didn't Intel arc GPUs get a performance boost?
Truth be told, I was expecting a LOT more out of this MSI Claw (even on the higher end one), I have been following this in detail from the announcement. When you talk about price point, the OLED deck is, what like $250 less than the MSI Claw? This is Intel's first shot at this. I was expecting a lot more from Intel after having a few years looking over what the Deck offered. Personally, the Claw is a joke right now. In this price point your looking at the Ally, or even the Legion GO and we all know they are both more powerful than the Deck.
Maybe it will get better over a few months but, I can't see it blowing away the deck (maybe get closer) but, don't even think it would be close to the Ally, or the Go.
Intel screwed this one up for sure. If things don't get better, I'll grab one of the 155H models when they are on clearance for like $300 just to keep in the car or something or make it a dedicated emulation device.
The only way to salvage the MSI Claw at this point is total removal of Windows and be replaced by a SteamOS alternative like ChimeraOS, while forcing the MSI Claw's APU to operate with just 15 watts or lower.
Right now, MSI and Intel found themselves in a hole, as they didn't do their homework.
They should have waited for lunar lake to launch a intel handheld. The battery gain would have made it compelling.
Is not Intel chance yet, maybe next gen... Maybe....
Even from first shots i see a horrible case quality of Claw. Horrible gigantic shell seams... Soo nasty...
Saw some articles saying there are driver updates that make the Claw perform better. Have you tested it since by chance?
Valve is really smart choosing Linux over crappy windows 😅
Wonder if the precached shaders on Steam Deck play some part in the FPS difference?
I'm glad I made the right choice and bought my deck. It's my favorite way of playing video games!
That Oled screen looks better by a mile in this video.
Somehow I knew before the video started that the Steam deck would be KING. I do have a few of these pc handhelds, but the MSI did not pass the smell test for me. What makes the Steam Deck so good is that it has less of those buzz words....like a lot of cores and threads. It does not have to spread all that power around to so many cores. It just utilizes the ones it already has efficiently.
Pulled the trigger on a OLED purchase last night. This validates my decision, not that I needed it to confirm I don't want a WIndows handheld.
I gotta wonder why would you create a gaming handheld with intel chips?
A comparison between the big 3 would be cool.
I'll tell you the result now. Steam Deck wins.
Great comparison. 👍🏾
Why would a company release a system in such condition? Of course all of these handhelds release with issues, that get corrected with updates(Steam Deck, Ally, etc.). But this is DOA at this point, as the price is high and everyone has seen the bad performance, and how much can updates truly fix this performance? The amount of time, money and R&D just seems all like a HUGE waste, as who is this for?
It’s only for RUclipsrs to say how bad it is. 😅🤷🏽♂️🤦🏽♂️
It all comes down to the fundamental chip architecture. In this case, Intel is years behind AMD, and their roadmap suggests possibly even close to a decade. Things like stutter can be fixed, and you could maybe see some modest gains of 10-20% if the drivers can be optimized, but overall, it's just DOA.
I'd love to see the same benchmarks on the MSI claw, but running something like Nobara in Gamescope session mode. Not trivial to set up - but not that hard either. I have so little use for Windows on these types of devices (or any devices for that matter).
Quite interested in the outcome of tests with parked cores or disabled ones. Either difference is shockinbly low or high :)
Did Intel pay MSI? I’m confused… also what happened to Intel fanboys, seems like they’ve all but disappeared nowadays
hey eta, i know this is off topic but, i was wondering if you might do a video with the msi claw vs the Anbernic win600 16gb model currently anbernic have this discounted so I was wondering from a price-to-performance comparison ? as you have both handhelds could be interesting just wondered what you thought
For the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmarks to compare I ran my Ally at the Steam Deck settings but at 1080p and FSR Quality instead of Balanced and I got an average of 33FPS at 18w with a minimum of 28.6FPS. So that completely destroys the Claw since that is slower at a lower resolution and more power consumption. At 30w the Ally does 39.2FPS and a minimum of 33FPS.
My Ally is running Bazzite for context and it would be interesting to see if the Claw is any better under Linux.
For the MSI Claw, please queue up the "womp womp womp womp" sound from the price is right.
Sadly, I would not pick either one of these.
I want an OLED handheld that can run Windows in HDR (Steam Deck OLED only supports HDR in SteamOS).
Of course, I wrote Special K, so HDR is very important to me and not being tied to Steam's DRM is a big plus too. The current crop of handhelds just isn't the full package. MSI could have knocked it out of the park if they included an OLED. Hopefully ASUS steps up to plate eventually, they have the most OLED laptops of any manufacturer, so it's surprising they have not yet.
From what I understand OLED are expensive to engineer. The Switch and Deck Oled were already engineered and there is no 7-8 inch landscape OLED. (tablets and phones uses portrait displays)
If Asus used a portrait OLED display for Ally 2 and the Ally fans would be crying because it wouldn't have VRR support.
HDR on the PC is behind and inferior compared to consoles. If you want good HDR you better stick with the PS5. I think some PC games look worst with HDR.
Westerners always create sturdier and better quality equipment than Asians
Thnx for the honesty.
PSA: MSI claw's 20W preset actually pulls more like 35W from the battery
Checks out. Intel chips perform much better with more power behind it. I thought it was interesting MSI chose to put it in a handheld. I still think it's too early to tell, though. Most handhelds are subpar right after the release date. (Including the o.g. steam deck) I'm interested to see what kind of support MSI is going to bring to the table with optimizations and what not.
STEAM DECK RULES
MSI CLAW DRULES
These two cpus are like 14900K and a 7800X3D, the Intel sometimes gets a few frames more, but for double and more power usage, and this is a (
gaming handheld where power is limited and shared with the gpu, and for gaming you don't need 16c/22t. The gpu on the claw will never have enough power available.
AMD Ryzen Architecture is unparalleled
Good video glad you showed this off, this why the Deck OLED to me still is the goat. Best price to performance ratio and the battery life is ❤️ idk what's up with MSI lmao those Intel chips are too hungry
ETA __actually__ criticizing a thing...
I'm shocked
If Intel can’t beat a 2 year old Steam Deck they should just focus on their higher wattage CPUs and leave this space to AMD
Intel’s APU made the claw dead in water for its price point. If you want high performance it’s Ally or Go. Everything else, SD
Let's be real, as long as no one dares create some kind of real good optimized supported os like the steamdeck, all of thoses super high end performance will be wasted. Man the msi claw with steam os would break all of the records
What record? Worst Handheld ever?
Lower frames, lower battery, higher price tag. That's embarrassing.
Bad decision going with Intel Arc as the iGPU. It just isn't ready yet. This device may be okay docked with an eGPU though?
There is no point with that, might as well just go with a full time desktop PC.