MSI’s latest Claw handheld isn’t out in the West yet, but it has released in China – and recently got pre-orders in Taiwan which gave further credence to its high price tag. Reviewers in China have already done some hands-on benchmarks, and now another round of tests have appeared for the MSI Claw A8, which is the company’s first AMD-powered handheld.
The Claw A8 is the first handheld on the market to use the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme processor. The Z2 series is already in use with the Legion Go S, though that uses the cut-down Z2 Go model which didn’t fair favorably compared to last-gen Z1 chips. However, the Z2 Extreme looks like a solid upgrade; we’ll also see in feature in the ROG Xbox Ally X this holiday season.
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MSI Claw A8 compared to the Z1 Extreme
Benchmark tests for the MSI Claw A8 have appeared on Geekbench, including CPU as well as graphics performance on OpenCL and Vulkan APIs. We can compare this to averaged Z1 Extreme tests, plus GPU tests for the same graphics APIs on the original ROG Ally using the Z1E.
| Benchmark | MSI Claw A8 (Z2 Extreme) | AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme |
|---|---|---|
| Single-core | 2,748 | 2,173 |
| Multi-core | 12,182 | 9,619 |
| OpenCL | 37,970 | 38,505 (ROG Ally Z1E) |
| Vulkan | 45,064 | 35,186 (ROG Ally Z1E) |
Something to note is that the MSI Claw A8 in these tests is running on a Balanced power plan, and the Ryzen Z2 Extreme is running at 4.3GHz clock speed, rather than its full 5.0GHz speeds as advertised by AMD. It’s also always worth noting that these are early benchmarks, so we’re looking forward to see more real-life (gaming) benchmarks in the future once the Claw A8 is more widely available.
Based on testing from Chinese reviewers so far, the Claw A8 delivered smooth gameplay in Ghost of Tsushima, running between 11-13W and over 3.5 hours of battery life. It could also hold a steady 30 FPS in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Since we’re looking at Z2 Extreme benchmarks, it may also give us a sneak peek into how the upcoming ROG Xbox Ally X will perform. The next flagship ASUS handheld and MSI Claw 8 both use the same CPU and both use 24GB of LPDDR5X-8000 of RAM.
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