MSI Claw benchmarks have popped up on the video-sharing site BilliBilli, and they don’t shine a great light on the A1M. It is essential not to get carried away by early benchmarks for a new piece of tech, though, especially when there appear to be anomalies in the benchmark results that the Claw is producing.
The MSI Claw release date is still unknown, but with this sample making it out into the wild, we have to assume that it’s not too far away. In this direct comparison to the ROG Ally Z1 Extreme, it comes out second best in every test, but there’s more to this video than meets the eye.
Four different games make up the tests here, across multiple TDP settings ranging from the max setting to as low as 15W. It was on the lowest setting that the biggest performance disparity was discovered, as while playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the MSI Claw manages 24fps while the ROG Ally almost doubled it with 42fps. On max TDP, the gap was closed to just 4fps, with the Claw managing 49fps and the Ally pushing 53fps.
Of the other games tested, the MSI claw underperformed in all of them. Cyberpunk 2077 running on low presets, alternating between FSR and XeSS, provided a 44.8fps average on the Claw, and 59.8fps on the ROG Ally.
The video specifies that the MSI Claw with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H is being tested, which is the more powerful of the two models set to be available at retail.
One oddity that we can’t get over is shown in the results of the benchmarks for multiple tests. The MSI Claw shows as having 128MB of VRAM vs the ROG Ally showing 4GB. The GPU clock speed or battery wattage is also missing from multiple tests, suggesting that this unit might be out in the wild without final drivers or firmware updates.
If one game had shown the anomaly, we could perhaps write it off as the game misreporting data, but both the Cyberpunk 2077 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark results show this mistake, meaning it’s more likely a system issue.
Given our short time with the handheld for our MSI Claw preview, we’d be surprised if there wasn’t more to this story and eagerly await our chance to start putting the MSI Claw through its paces ahead of its release.