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[Topher]

Rumors were true — MSI indeed has a Ryzen-powered handheld.

Today, MSI announced its first Ryzen-powered gaming handheld, and as expected, it is part of the Claw series. The new Claw A8 BZ2EM is powered by the Ryzen Z2 series, meaning MSI is already ahead of companies like ASUS with their ROG Ally by revealing the new handheld earlier.

MSI has confirmed that its AMD-powered system will feature less memory than the Claw 8 series with Intel Lunar Lake. Instead of 32GB, which has been standard for Core 200V-based systems, the AMD version includes 24GB of memory. MSI also confirmed it uses LPDDR5X-8000 memory, which is not upgradeable. It's worth noting that the Claw 8 with Intel hardware was initially teased with 16GB RAM, but MSI never launched that configuration.

The Ryzen Z2 Extreme features 8 cores and 16 threads based on Zen5/c architecture, and comes equipped with Radeon 890M graphics (16 RDNA3.5 Compute Units).
In terms of the screen, it has an 8-inch Full-HD display with a 120Hz refresh rate, 100% sRGB coverage, and 500 nits of brightness. This appears to be the same screen as in the Intel version. Additionally, there's one M.2 2280 storage slot for upgrades and two USB4 connectors supporting Thunderbolt 4.

The battery is also the same, a 6-cell 80Wh unit. There's support for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. Compared to the Intel version, the AMD model features slower Wi-Fi (the Intel system supports Wi-Fi 7).
MSI is yet to announce availability and pricing.

https://videocardz.com/newz/msi-claw-a8-gaming-handheld-features-amd-ryzen-ai-z2-extreme-and-24gb-ram

 

[Topher]

Added a poll. I'm thinking these will be an easy $1000 myself

 

[DeepEnigma]

Clawgrip you say?

rodrigolfp GITT

 

[LavitzSlambert]

I think these handhelds are going to take the place of most gaming laptops eventually, but I don't understand how they all think they can succeed in this market, especially against Valve's Steam Deck and the Microsoft branded handhelds.

 

[rodrigolfp]

"16 RDNA3.5 Compute Units"

FSR4 ftw.

 

[Topher]

I think these handhelds are going to take the place of most gaming laptops eventually, but I don't understand how they all think they can succeed in this market, especially against Valve's Steam Deck and the Microsoft branded handhelds.

Same way all the gaming laptop manufacturer's succeed, I guess. They are not aiming to sell 100 million like consoles are.

 

[Diseased Yak]

Hmm, tempting, but I'm definitely holding off to see what ASUS and MS do.

 

[Haint]

The fact that AMD are still making these "Gaming APU's" with cutting edge 8C/16T desktop class CPU performance and tiny ass last-gen GPU's is utterly baffling and completely backwards. Their GPU's struggle to run most modern games at like 540p 30fps but they still waste incredibly valuable die space and power budgets on 8 cutting edge CPU cores that peak at like 20-30% utilization and sit idle 95% of the time.

 

[Spukc]

switch 2 will murder this thing

 

[VolticArchangel]

$1200 plus easily, would not be surprised if it's more.

 

[Haint]

$1200 plus easily, would not be surprised if it's more.

Nah, it's spec-ually nearly identical to the $799 ROG Ally X, albeit subbing in the newer 2nd gen APU. The Z1 Extreme will be 2.5 years old by the time this thing launches so this is just a normal generational replacement, not a chip double the size or anything crazy). $799, $899, or $999 depending on how Asus prices the Z2 Ally, how aggressive they want to be, and how hard they forecast tarriffs will ding them.

 

[yet_another_alt]

Why do they keep cheapening out on the RAM?

 

[Mister Wolf]

FSR4 support?

 

[Magic Carpet]

1200 if you can even find it. This thing will sell out and then the ASUS versions will replace it with more units.

 

[Ozriel]

The fact that AMD are still making these "Gaming APU's" with cutting edge 8C/16T desktop class CPU performance and tiny ass last-gen GPU's is utterly baffling and completely backwards. Their GPU's struggle to run most modern games at like 540p 30fps but they still waste incredibly valuable die space and power budgets on 8 cutting edge CPU cores that peak at like 20-30% utilization and sit idle 95% of the time.

Completely clueless take. GPU wise, it's pretty solid. And having a decent CPU helps for desktop/docked use, as well as solid emulation performance.

Folks are playing KCD2 on the Ally X at 900p 40fps, medium settings. And this is a more powerful chip than that.

Why do they keep cheapening out on the RAM?

24GB? That's not 'cheapening out' by any means

 

[yet_another_alt]

Completely clueless take. GPU wise, it's pretty solid. And having a decent CPU helps for desktop/docked use, as well as solid emulation performance.

Folks are playing KCD2 on the Ally X at 900p 40fps, medium settings. And this is a more powerful chip than that.



24GB? That's not 'cheapening out' by any means

Considering you have to allocate VRAM, yes it is. Even the lesser known Chinese handhelds are using 32GB as the standard now.

 

[tkscz]

I wonder if they make a profit off these things? It'll easily be $1000+. I think they are releasing too soon one after the other.

 

[HeisenbergFX4]

So many handhelds coming.

 

[Rocky_Balboa]

So many handhelds coming.

Yeah, I am thinking of buying one next year. Which one is the question.

 

[Topher]

Considering you have to allocate VRAM, yes it is. Even the lesser known Chinese handhelds are using 32GB as the standard now.

Eh....how much are you going to allocate to play at 1080p?

 

[StereoVsn]

Considering you have to allocate VRAM, yes it is. Even the lesser known Chinese handhelds are using 32GB as the standard now.

Yep, there shouldn't be a reason for a high end handheld to go lower vs 32GB since you will have 8GB minimum reserved. Cost difference can't be that large.

 

[LiquidMetal14]

Insecure Switch 2 fanatics tremble.

 

[StereoVsn]

Eh....how much are you going to allocate to play at 1080p?

I mean probably 8GB or 12GB, but there shouldn't be that much reason to go to 24GB vs 32GB.

 

[yet_another_alt]

Eh....how much are you going to allocate to play at 1080p?

24/8 or even 16/16 depending on texture quality that I want.

 

[Radical_3d]

All these no-AI reconstruction handhelds are DOA, IMO.

 

[SABRE220]

The lack of RDNA4 makes this feel like an incomplete product. The lack of ml and fsr4 is too glaring an omission to ignore, handhelds are he prime options to make use of the tech due to limited bandwidth and power and yet we will once again have to rely on the shit that is fsr3...its okay at 1440p and above but for handhelds where you have to upscale from 540p etc its a damn disaster. The sad thing is this hardware, while significantly superior to the switch2 in compute, will end up being similar just due to the lack of foresight from AMD.

 

[Haint]

Completely clueless take. GPU wise, it's pretty solid. And having a decent CPU helps for desktop/docked use, as well as solid emulation performance.

Folks are playing KCD2 on the Ally X at 900p 40fps, medium settings. And this is a more powerful chip than that.



24GB? That's not 'cheapening out' by any means

Clueless, I've had an Ally since launch day. Deliverance 2 is like the least resource intensive game in recent memory, game could run on a calculator. Meanwhile go try to play FF16, SH2, Wilds, Rebirth, Wukong, Ragnarok, Forbidden West, Oblivion, etc... and marvel as you have to resort to aggressive Deep Sub-720p upscaling, ultra low settings, to turn them into water brushed impressionist PS1 pixelation renditions of themselves. The GPU is comically underpowered in these things while the CPU is comically overpowered. Literally nobody's using this shit as a desktop computing replacement. These APU's need at minimum 50% more GPU CU's and would probably still be tilted CPU heavy with 6 cores. The CPU in the Ally benchmarks a hair behind the desktop 7700X, that is stupid as fuck..

 

[Dorfdad]

$1200 plus easily, would not be surprised if it's more.

DOA

 

[StereoVsn]

Clueless, I've had an Ally since launch day. Deliverance 2 is like the least resource intensive game in recent memory, game could run on a calculator. Meanwhile go try to play FF16, SH2, Wilds, Rebirth, Wukong, Ragnarok, Forbidden West, Oblivion, etc... and marvel as you have to resort to aggressive Deep Sub-720p upscaling, ultra low settings, to turn them into water brushed impressionist PS1 pixelation renditions of themselves. The GPU is comically underpowered in these things while the CPU is comically overpowered. Literally nobody's using this shit as a desktop computing replacement. These APU's need at minimum 50% more GPU CU's and would probably still be tilted CPU heavy with 6 cores. The CPU in the Ally benchmarks a hair behind the desktop 7700X, that is stupid as fuck..

I think we will see some improvement with UDNA in a year or two, but unfortunately this is it for at least till late 2026 or later.

 

[Buggy Loop]

FSR4 support?

Nope

HX370 found in zenbook laptops is the same thing and does not have FSR 4.

The Z2 Extreme has 8 CPU cores rather than the 12 cores of HX370 but still should give you an idea, with likely lower clock boosts in handheld form than a zenbook.





Look at the framerates, not just avg, Z1 Extreme in asus rog ally X is exceeding sometimes HX370, while the later one has better low 1% and low 0.1% so affecting avg framerate, arguably smoother, but still, hogwarts and AC valhalla shockingly have lower framerates far too often.

But like 780M based RDNA 3 / Z1 Extreme and 890M with Z2 Extreme, neither of them can really make use of all the compute in gaming because they are bandwidth starved.

They are comicly way off from Steam deck, consoles or a desktop GPU

"In contrast, Ryzen Z1 Extreme's very large and fast iGPU outpaces advances in memory bandwidth"

Z1 to Z1 Extreme was 3 times the number of CUs but it never showed up in games.

Its kind of why I guess there's no Steam deck 2 yet because for Valve this is nonsense wasted potential.
Very badly engineered imo, completely unbalanced. The hard fact is that right now anything mobile is limited by LPDDR5x memory, doesn't matter if you try to raise compute power by huge amounts if there's stagnation in memory. There's no architectures in the world right now on either Intel, AMD or Nvidia that would manage to feed those high computational GPUs with that kind of memory bandwidth.

I think the day we see a departure from LPDDR5x, we'll see Steam deck 2 pop up. If Valve says they are waiting for a big change on PC handhelds before the next iterations, it all depends on memory.

 

[readonly]

Clueless, I've had an Ally since launch day. Deliverance 2 is like the least resource intensive game in recent memory, game could run on a calculator. Meanwhile go try to play FF16, SH2, Wilds, Rebirth, Wukong, Ragnarok, Forbidden West, Oblivion, etc... and marvel as you have to resort to aggressive Deep Sub-720p upscaling, ultra low settings, to turn them into water brushed impressionist PS1 pixelation renditions of themselves. The GPU is comically underpowered in these things while the CPU is comically overpowered. Literally nobody's using this shit as a desktop computing replacement. These APU's need at minimum 50% more GPU CU's and would probably still be tilted CPU heavy with 6 cores. The CPU in the Ally benchmarks a hair behind the desktop 7700X, that is stupid as fuck..

6 cores means 2 turned off wasting die space. Unless I'm mistaken, I think 4 cores would be what you would be getting to cut the size in half for more GPU.

 

[SomeNorseGuy]

I'm all covered in the handheld department atm, unless someone releases a good dual screen handheld I'm going to hold off to see what kind of hardware Steam Deck 2 classifies as a worthy upgrade.

 

[Mister Wolf]

Nope

HX370 found in zenbook laptops is the same thing and does not have FSR 4.

The Z2 Extreme has 8 CPU cores rather than the 12 cores of HX370 but still should give you an idea, with likely lower clock boosts in handheld form than a zenbook.





Look at the framerates, not just avg, Z1 Extreme in asus rog ally X is exceeding sometimes HX370, while the later one has better low 1% and low 0.1% so affecting avg framerate, arguably smoother, but still, hogwarts and AC valhalla shockingly have lower framerates far too often.

But like 780M based RDNA 3 / Z1 Extreme and 890M with Z2 Extreme, neither of them can really make use of all the compute in gaming because they are bandwidth starved.

They are comicly way off from Steam deck, consoles or a desktop GPU

"In contrast, Ryzen Z1 Extreme's very large and fast iGPU outpaces advances in memory bandwidth"

Z1 to Z1 Extreme was 3 times the number of CUs but it never showed up in games.

Its kind of why I guess there's no Steam deck 2 yet because for Valve this is nonsense wasted potential.
Very badly engineered imo, completely unbalanced. The hard fact is that right now anything mobile is limited by LPDDR5x memory, doesn't matter if you try to raise compute power by huge amounts if there's stagnation in memory. There's no architectures in the world right now on either Intel, AMD or Nvidia that would manage to feed those high computational GPUs with that kind of memory bandwidth.

I think the day we see a departure from LPDDR5x, we'll see Steam deck 2 pop up. If Valve says they are waiting for a big change on PC handhelds before the next iterations, it all depends on memory.

Is this thing more powerful than a Series S?

 

[SABRE220]

Clueless, I've had an Ally since launch day. Deliverance 2 is like the least resource intensive game in recent memory, game could run on a calculator. Meanwhile go try to play FF16, SH2, Wilds, Rebirth, Wukong, Ragnarok, Forbidden West, Oblivion, etc... and marvel as you have to resort to aggressive Deep Sub-720p upscaling, ultra low settings, to turn them into water brushed impressionist PS1 pixelation renditions of themselves. The GPU is comically underpowered in these things while the CPU is comically overpowered. Literally nobody's using this shit as a desktop computing replacement. These APU's need at minimum 50% more GPU CU's and would probably still be tilted CPU heavy with 6 cores. The CPU in the Ally benchmarks a hair behind the desktop 7700X, that is stupid as fuck..

The problem is that ram tech just isn't there to supply the gpu with enough bandwidth. They are using some of the fastest mobile ram and yet the gpu is severely bandwidth limited. Amd rdna3.5 isn't particularly efficient with limited bandwidth and increasing core count will yield barely any meaningful improvement as its already throttling to keep up with th3 compute power available. Atleast with the cpu cores allow the device to keep up with desktops in cpu limited games and in emulation.

Unfortunately its just a badly engineered chip that is woefully unbalanced due to the lack of foresight and options in amds road map. This is basically them throwing whatever they have cheaply available currently at the board in terms of gpu tech and making do in the form of a supposedly mobile apu.

 

[KeplerL2]

Nope

HX370 found in zenbook laptops is the same thing and does not have FSR 4.

The Z2 Extreme has 8 CPU cores rather than the 12 cores of HX370 but still should give you an idea, with likely lower clock boosts in handheld form than a zenbook.





Look at the framerates, not just avg, Z1 Extreme in asus rog ally X is exceeding sometimes HX370, while the later one has better low 1% and low 0.1% so affecting avg framerate, arguably smoother, but still, hogwarts and AC valhalla shockingly have lower framerates far too often.

But like 780M based RDNA 3 / Z1 Extreme and 890M with Z2 Extreme, neither of them can really make use of all the compute in gaming because they are bandwidth starved.

They are comicly way off from Steam deck, consoles or a desktop GPU

"In contrast, Ryzen Z1 Extreme's very large and fast iGPU outpaces advances in memory bandwidth"

Z1 to Z1 Extreme was 3 times the number of CUs but it never showed up in games.

Its kind of why I guess there's no Steam deck 2 yet because for Valve this is nonsense wasted potential.
Very badly engineered imo, completely unbalanced. The hard fact is that right now anything mobile is limited by LPDDR5x memory, doesn't matter if you try to raise compute power by huge amounts if there's stagnation in memory. There's no architectures in the world right now on either Intel, AMD or Nvidia that would manage to feed those high computational GPUs with that kind of memory bandwidth.

I think the day we see a departure from LPDDR5x, we'll see Steam deck 2 pop up. If Valve says they are waiting for a big change on PC handhelds before the next iterations, it all depends on memory.

It just needs larger caches and prefetching/memory compression improvements from RDNA4/5, which is exactly what PS/Xbox handhelds will have.

 

[StereoVsn]

It just needs larger caches and prefetching/memory compression improvements from RDNA4/5, which is exactly what PS/Xbox handhelds will have.

I think Xbox one is just rebadged Asus so it's unlikely to have a custom chip. At least the one that's coming soon.

 

[Miyazaki’s Slave]

Microsoft branded handhelds.

This was mentioned earlier in this thread but the MS branded handhelds are going to be this, and the asus one, and whatever else gets released. I don't think anyone is expecting MS to actually make a hand held device, they are just going to go with a hardware provider and slap some "X" on it.

My take anyway.

 

[LavitzSlambert]

This was mentioned earlier in this thread but the MS branded handhelds are going to be this, and the asus one, and whatever else gets released. I don't think anyone is expecting MS to actually make a hand held device, they are just going to go with a hardware provider and slap some "X" on it.

My take anyway.

I didn't realize this was going to be that branded one, I thought there was a separate Xbox branded one and this one was basically the same thing, minus the logo.

 

[Miyazaki’s Slave]

I didn't realize this was going to be that branded one, I thought there was a separate Xbox branded one and this one was basically the same thing, minus the logo.

Sorry, no, I was too direct. I agree with you. I don't think this model is the "one" but I was just referring to 3rd party folks creating the hardware and Xbox branding it. (I think 8bitdo who makes all those "xbox branded" controllers and accys).

 

[KeplerL2]

I think Xbox one is just rebadged Asus so it's unlikely to have a custom chip. At least the one that's coming soon.

Yeah I'm talking about the real Xbox handheld coming in a few years

 

[Buggy Loop]

Is this thing more powerful than a Series S?

Naw, completely kneecapped by LPDDR5x

I would imagine that Series S (didn't calculate) is the same memory bandwidth to compute ratio as Series X, which is 0.046.

Even if the handheld would double or triple Series S' compute, 0.013 Z1 Extreme's memory banwidth to compute ratio it would just shrink down with current memory. Entering in the 0.00X digits. Makes no sense.

Apparently what Z2 extreme brings to table more than Z1 extreme compute is efficiency basically, I think they'll have a nice boost to battery life.

 

[FingerBang]

As much as I've been waiting for a worthy upgrade to my ROG Ally (I upgraded its battery myself), I'm a bit skeptical about the performance boost we're getting from the Z2 Extreme.

If they really sell these things for $1000, I'm not even bothering picking one up. Almost twice the price for a 30% boost? What are we, Nvidia now?

 

[Darkness_Arises]

switch 2 will murder this thing

In sales sure, in performance the S2 is behind the Z1 extreme handhelds released 2 years ago (Legion Go, Rog Ally, etc). Z2 extreme based handhelds will be far ahead of the S2 in performance and will cost more than it too. See how crazed Nintendo fanboys on this forum always bring up the Steam Deck and its ancient APU in comparisons but none of the aforementioned handhelds. That is because the Z1 extreme butchers the S2 to hell and back and it should as it is a bigger, more power hungry chip.

 

[Zathalus]

Curious how it will compare against the Intel Claw, because when the drivers for a game are decent, it has seriously good performance for a handheld.

 

[Thebonehead]

Added a poll. I'm thinking these will be an easy $1000 myself

$949 is my guess

 

[ClanOfNone]

How hot do these things get? Packing all that horsepower in a tiny frame I'm guessing they can get mighty toasty.