Intel-Powered MSI Claw Seemingly Struggling To Keep Up With AMD-Powered ROG Ally

Intel-Powered MSI Claw Seemingly Struggling To Keep Up With AMD-Powered ROG Ally

At the beginning of this year, MSI surprised launched the Claw handheld which, interestingly, is powered by Intel’s new Core Ultra chip instead of the AMD Ryzen Z1 series that every mainstream handheld maker has opted for until this point, like the ASUS ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go.

Of course, this creates a debate about whether Team Blue or Team Red is the better chip for gaming handhelds. Chinese media outlets have compared both devices in a video posted on the video-sharing site Bilibili, and the results are somewhat surprising: the MSI Claw is universally slower than the ROG Ally, despite the Core Ultra 7 155H having better compute performance on paper.

Videocardz has compiled a list of benchmark results as follows:

All isn’t lost for MSI Claw, however. The Intel-powered handheld did win on one metric, which is battery life – in a 20W controlled test, the MSI handheld managed to last for around 2 hours, whereas the ROG Ally managed to stay powered on for 1.2 hours. One thing to note: based on the battery discharge rate, the ROG Ally draws more power for its components (9W vs 5.5W), such as internal display, RGB lighting, speakers, and more. Generally, the Claw lasts around 60% longer on a single charge based on the tests.

While the performance numbers paint a less-than-ideal picture for MSI and Intel, note that there could be more optimizations available given both the Claw and Core Ultra (and its Arc Graphics) are still very new. Driver optimizations down the line may help the handheld achieve at least performance parity against the ROG Ally, but for now, perhaps the ROG handheld is the better choice if performance is what you’re after.

Pokdepinion: That’s surprising. I was expecting at least performance parity between the two.