MSI Claw A8

Introduction

The MSI Claw A8 BZ2EM is the first gaming handheld to sport AMD’s beefy new Ryzen Z2 Extreme.

It’s actually the first iteration of any MSI Claw system to feature an AMD processor, and comes promising major performance gains with the new chip in a similar shell to the Intel-powered MSI Claw 8 AI+, with its excellent ergonomics, big 8-inch 1920×1200 IPS 120Hz screen and a capacious 80Whr battery.

You can’t expect all of this power to come cheap, and at £849, it definitely isn’t. It’s £50 more than the retail price of the Ryzen Z1 Extreme-powered Asus ROG Ally X, but £50 less than the new Xbox-flavoured ROG Xbox Ally X that trades an inch of screen real estate for more RAM, plus its unique Xbox design flair.

I’ve been using this Claw A8 for the last couple of weeks as my main gaming handheld to see if it’s worth your time and hard-earned cash.

Design

• Larger, blockier feel
• Comfortable in hand, if quite heavy
• Decent port selection

The Claw A8 features some redesigns against its predecessor in terms of its chassis, with blockier hand grips to make it a little more comfortable than before.

As much as there’s a huge 8-inch screen to dazzle you, and this handheld weighs in at 765g, it doesn’t feel unwieldy in-hand. I had no issues using this MSI option for extended periods, finding it to be immensely comfortable with a sensible thumbstick and button placement on the front side, plus some additional ones on the rear like a pro-grade console controller. It is entirely plastic, but I won’t hold that against it.

It’s available in either white, as my sample is, or a bright green (Microsoft should have used this for the ROG Xbox Ally models), providing a refreshing look to the sea of black handhelds out there. It looks the part in doing so, with a blockier aesthetic that leans more towards the traditional gamer aesthetic that it seems like we were getting past at one point in time.

Ports are entirely confined to the top side, with a pair of USB4-capable Type-C ports (one of which can be used for charging), plus a headphone jack and Micro SD card slot should you need it. There you’ll also find the all-important power button and a status LED. 

The presence of two USB-C ports on the top side makes them easily accessible, plus as they’re Thunderbolt-compatible, you can hook the Claw A8 up to an external monitor with ease, as I did.

Controls

• Familiar control layout
• Hall-effect sticks and triggers for stronger precision
• No customisation

MSI also hasn’t re-invented the wheel with the control layout here, with a pair of diagonally opposing thumbsticks with lovely texturing to them, plus ABXY buttons above on the right side and a D-Pad on the left. It’s familiar and works well.

The top side is home to two sets of shoulder buttons and triggers that have some useful texturing on them and good travel for analogue inputs. As previously mentioned, there are also a pair of clicky paddles on the rear side.

The thumbsticks and triggers here are Hall effect, meaning they’re a lot more accurate and durable than more traditional mechanisms. They have a smooth feel to them in use. The main buttons don’t have the same haptic feedback as Asus’ handheld.

Beyond this, there unfortunately doesn’t seem to be more advanced remapping and customisation for the triggers or thumbsticks, as you’ll find on the ROG Ally X.

Display

• Large IPS screen
• Bright and punchy
• Okay resolution for the size

The screen on the Claw A8 is one of the larger panels you’ll find on a gaming handheld. It’s an 8-inch 1920×1200 IPS option with a higher 120Hz refresh rate for improved responsiveness over a more standard 60Hz option.

Going for IPS over OLED at this higher price point is perhaps a bit of a surprise, given the Steam Deck OLED has been a thing for some time, but it may be the case that MSI faced the same trade-off as Asus between OLED and variable refresh rate as with the ROG Xbox Ally models.

Getting my trusty colorimeter out revealed this to be a very punchy screen, with a peak brightness of 514.9 nits, with some okay contrast for the panel type, with a 1330:1 ratio. The 0.26 black level out of the box is okay, if not the deepest.

For mainstream gaming workloads, the 99% sRGB colour accuracy is more than fine, although both the DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB results at 77% mean it isn’t a screen for anything more than that. Given this device’s purpose, it isn’t much of a miss.

In a general sense, I found the Claw A8 panel to provide decent detail with a 1920×1200 max resolution, plus the 120Hz refresh rate certainly aids in providing a sharper and smoother feel than 60Hz choices, which is very welcome.

Performance

• Ryzen Z2 Extreme is a powerful chip
• Decent performance in games, as long as you fiddle with settings
• Bizarre SSD performance  

MSI touted this handheld to offer much stronger performance than the previous Intel-powered model, thanks to the new Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip inside – against that handheld, they tout a 30% performance boost.

The Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip inside this Claw A8 BZ2EM is the headline addition, featuring Zen 5 cores and 16 threads, plus a 16-core RDNA 3.5-based GPU that’s the same Radeon 890M integrated graphics found in AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 laptop processor. It is a small, but important, step up from the Ryzen Z1 Extreme found in the Asus ROG Ally X, too.

Alongside this grunt in a processing sense, MSI has opted to go for 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM in this handheld, plus a 1TB internal SSD for storage. In theory, this might seem like enough storage, but with a couple of bigger games installed, that’s half your storage gone.

I ran the Claw A8 through our usual suite of computing benchmarks to provide some quantifiable idea of how well this handheld performs in both games and a range of synthetic tests.

In the likes of Geekbench 6, I noted the scores achieved by the Ryzen Z2 Extreme to be quite similar to those on the laptop-class Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, especially when the MSI handheld was plugged in and at its most powerful. 

Running it unplugged saw performance here and in Cinebench R23 take a small hit, although still went to prove that it is a capable chip in synthetic terms. 

The Radeon 890M integrated graphics posted a reasonable score in 3DMark Time Spy, although the result there and the associated gaming benchmarks go to prove that even this new Ryzen Z2 Extreme chip is far behind the newer Strix Halo APUs found in the likes of the Asus ROG Flow Z13 (2025) that’ll hopefully make their way to these handhelds soon. 

For reference, the Radeon 8050S in the ROG Flow Z13 (2025) has double the compute units and much more bandwidth for a lot of added grunt.

Moving over to some games, I attempted to run them at the same settings as with more standard laptops for the same quantifiable idea. In Returnal at Full HD on the top preset, the Claw A8 BZ2EM managed 24fps, while in Cyberpunk 2077, it hit 23.23fps. 

These aren’t groundbreaking numbers, admittedly, but enable FSR 2.1 upscaling in Performance mode, and you’ll see FPS results rise to 35fps  and 34.27fps, respectively. Dialling down some graphical settings will yield stronger results, of course.

Of course, adding in ray-tracing into Cyberpunk 2077 at the heavy RT: Ultra preset turns the benchmark into a literal slideshow, but adding in FSR 2.1 Performance actually tripled the framerate to 18.07fps.

For less demanding and more competitive eSports titles such as Rainbow Six Extraction, this hit 64fps without any form of upscaling at the default highest preset, so it’ll be possible to get closer to maxing out the 120Hz refresh rate with some lower quality settings.

Likewise, in booting up Forza Horizon 5 at its standard High preset at native 1920×1200 resolution posted an average result of 59fps without any upscaling. The game itself looked great in actual use and felt especially responsive.

The 1TB SSD didn’t turn out to be anywhere near as fast on battery power as it did when the Claw A8 BZ2EM was plugged in, weirdly. It posted respective reads and writes of 3535.77 MB/s and 3269.97MB/s on battery, plus 6389.92MB/s reads and 5729.39MB/s writes, which are decent, if a little confusing.

MSI has worked on the cooling system for this new handheld with its new Cooler Boost HyperFlow thermal management system which seemed to work okay while the device was in use. I didn’t notice it getting too warm, apart from in one instance when the handheld was connected to a Thunderbolt port to an external display, where it overheated and shut off.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 2 hours 45 minutes in the gaming battery test
• 65W brick puts charge back into it fast

The Claw A8 BZ2EM features a large 80Whr cell, which is the same as the ROG Ally X and its associated Xbox counterpart, and double the size of the battery in the original Asus ROG Ally.

With the brightness dialled down to the same 150 nits we use for laptop testing, this MSI handheld managed to last for nearly 10 hours on a charge with the PCMark 10 Modern Office benchmark test, which is respectable.

Gaming is of course a bigger battery drain, and in the PCMark 10 Gaming benchmark, it went down to 2 hours and 45 minutes of use before conking out. This is about the same time you’ll get with the ROG Ally X, and means you’ll want to keep a power bank or the 65W power brick nearby if you’re going to be using the Claw A8 BZ2EM for an extended period.

It’s a brisk adapter in putting charge back into that 80Wh cell, taking just 31 minutes to get it from zero to 50%, while a full charge took 70 minutes.

Games and Software

• Windows 11 on a handheld is a blessing and a curse
• Weak touchscreen experience for a desktop OS
• MSI’s overlay is fine, if a little basic

The Claw A8 BZ2EM comes running Windows 11 which, in typical Microsoft fashion, is both a blessing and a curse. Granted, it gives you a familiar UI with typical PC functionality if you want it, but every passing minute I used it only emboldened me to hate Windows 11 on a touchscreen even more.

As our review noted with the ROG Ally X, it isn’t a touch-friendly operating system in any guise with icons being too small to hit confidently, even when you increase the resolution scale in settings. What’s more, the on-screen keyboard comfortably takes up more than half the screen when in use, which is just an annoyance. A separate set of peripherals is a bit of a must.

Being Windows does at least mean you’re free to use this device as you would a normal PC and install all manner of games from a range of PC storefronts, and you can use the Xbox app to supplement this, too.

If you want to use this as a gaming handheld without the Windows business, the MSI overlay that the Claw A8 comes with is okay. It provides a quick and easy means of getting into installed games that get pulled through from whichever launcher you use – Steam, Ubisoft Connect, Epic Games or whichever. It isn’t as feature-rich as Asus’ ROG Armoury Crate SE by any means, though, although there are system processes available to adjust on the fly with the addition of Xbox Game Bar.

The Xbox Full Screen Experience that’s shipping with the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds and coming to other models as part of a software update soon for Windows is likely to provide a more feature-rich and games-first UI that doesn’t feel a smidgen half-baked, although I am yet to test it as it’s in a preview build that would be unfair to judge.

The background processes involved with Windows are likely taking valuable system resources away from the handheld’s gaming grunt, which is one thing that the Xbox UI should hopefully fix in time.

Should you buy it?

FAQs