Original in more ways than one, the MSI Claw partly missed the mark, due to a launch price that was too high and a software environment that could still be perfected. On this second point, things are progressing rapidly.
A little over two years ago, Valve surprised everyone by launching a devilishly well-designed little machine, the Steam Deck. A true hybrid of portable console and PC, it relies on the number-one video game platform, Steam, to enable anyone to take their game library with them wherever they go. Thanks to an aggressive sales price and the quality of the product, the success of the Steam Deck was not long in coming, and since then, many companies in the PC world have been trying to reproduce this success. The latest arrival, MSI's Claw, is the first console to rely on Intel processors, whereas until now all machines were powered by AMD.
MSI
This change of cremerie could have led to an interesting repositioning of prices, but it didn't. Worse still, the MSI Claw is more expensive than the Steam Deck, but also than the ASUS ROG Ally or the Lenovo Legion Pro, its main competitors. As we said at the outset, however, this is just one of MSI's problems with its Claw. Indeed, the console also - and perhaps above all - suffered from a software environment that was still too imperfect, with a few annoying bugs and performance well below expectations.
Fortunately, MSI has no intention of giving up, and the brand can also count on the support of Intel, which regularly updates the graphics drivers for its latest chips. MSI is improving its machine support and, very recently, has even rolled out a new BIOS. The BIOS is the fundamental firmware of a PC, the one that manages the machine's inputs and outputs at the lowest level. In the case of the Claw, the combination of new BIOS and new graphics drivers has enabled considerable progress to be made on many games. For example, MSI reports a 43.5% increase in performance on F1 23, 27.6% on Hogwarts Legacy, 22.6% on Diablo 4, 21.9% on Dead Space, 18.4% on Forza Horizon 5 and 10.3% on the recent Helldivers 2.
© MSI
Updating graphics drivers is as easy as 1-2-3 from the machine's Windows operating system (or by downloading the driver from Intel's website). Updating the Claw's BIOS, on the other hand, requires a little more care. Oh, it's not rocket science, but you need to follow MSI's recommendations to the letter (see image above) to avoid any problems. Suffice it to say that with a few more updates of this level, the Claw will undoubtedly have much more convincing arguments to put forward, especially as price reductions could also make it more attractive very quickly.
