Steam Deck, ROG Ally and Legion GO are about to face competition of a rather different kind... based on an Intel component.
While Valve brought its Steam Deck to market over a year ago, and ASUS, Lenovo, Logitech and Razer have already joined the fray, MSI has yet to enter the fast-growing sector of small, portable PC-hybrid consoles. At CES 2024 in Las Vegas, the Taiwanese brand made its arrival official. However, there's no word yet on the date or pricing. This is essential information that MSI has not seen fit to communicate: perhaps things haven't yet been decided?
MSI
It has to be said that for this console, christened Claw, MSI is aiming to be more original than its competitors. In fact, rather than integrating an APU designed by AMD, MSI has gone shopping with its competitors, Intel. In this case, the A1M version of the Claw - does this mean that several variations are already planned? - is built around the Core Ultra 7 155H, one of Intel's most recent processors: part of the Meteor Lake range, launched at the very end of last year. A processor with many assets, starting with its modernity. What's more, it features a whopping 16 cores for 22 threads, divided into 6 high-performance cores, 8 efficient cores and 2 SoC cores with a maximum frequency of 4.8 GHz. More importantly for MSI, Intel has equipped its chip with a rather muscular graphics solution, comprising eight Arc cores, Xe-Cores at 2.25 GHz.
MSI
As for RAM, it's pretty standard with 16 GB of LPDDR5, and MSI mentions the presence of a 7-inch panel with a 1920 x 1080 pixel definition, as on many machines of this type. This is an IPS panel with a maximum refresh rate of 120 Hz. One minor disappointment is that the onboard SSD is a 2230 format model, whereas a 2242 or 2280 would have offered more capacity options. Finally, MSI emphasizes the power (53 Whr) of its 6-cell battery, capable of lasting " 2 hours under extreme gaming conditions ". Of course, we can't wait to see the beast in action, but for that to happen, MSI will have to announce a release date and a selling price.
