MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ Review: The Best Handheld PC, but You’ll Have to Pay for It

All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Gizmodo may earn an affiliate commission. What do you actually want your gaming handheld to do for you? If you told me, “Play Nintendo games,” go buy a Switch 2. If next on your checklist is “Give me the best mix of performance and efficiency in something I can take on a plane,” then there’s only one answer now. It’s the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, an $1,800 handheld PC. At that price, you can claim a not-too-shabby desktop gaming PC. Thanks to obscene memory prices, this is the world we live in now. If you want a TL;DR version of this review: the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ sets the new high-water mark for gaming handhelds going forward. Its Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip is a great fit for FHD gaming. Compared to the AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme found inside handhelds like the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X and the Lenovo Legion Go 2, the Claw 8 EX AI+ can slip in 10, 20, or even more frames per second on the same graphics settings. A 30% to 40% increase in frame rate doesn’t seem like much, but it’s everything to a handheld that’s threading the needle between power and performance. The catch