MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ price is so high it can buy an RTX 5060 gaming laptop while leaving plenty for handheld console

When Intel first started showing what the Arc G3 Extreme SoC was capable of, the company warned that the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ handheld console using the SoC would not be cheap. We expressed the same fear in our hands-on video of the console, which is linked at the end. MSI has now officially revealed the price, and the Claw 8 EX AI+ is scary expensive.

In fact, the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ is so expensive that you can currently buy an RTX 5060 gaming laptop with 32 GB of DDR5 memory and a QHD display alongside a handheld gaming console for the price of one Claw 8 EX AI+.

The laptop we are talking about is the Gigabyte Aero X16 with a Ryzen AI 7 350, an RTX 5060 laptop GPU, 32 GB of RAM, and a 1 TB SSD, which has now dropped by $150 to $1,249.99 at Best Buy. We gave the Gigabyte Aero X16 a “good” rating of 84% in our review due to its sturdy chassis, pleasing display, expandable RAM, and more.

Moving the discussion to the handheld we mentioned above, you can get the Asus ROG Xbox Ally with a Ryzen Z2 A APU, 16 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of storage for $679.99 on Amazon.

So, buying the Gigabyte Aero X16 and the Asus ROG Xbox Ally will cost you a combined $1,930. This is only $130 more than the price of the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+.

So, even if you were intrigued by the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, the handheld looks like a tough sell at $1,799. If one can get a decent gaming laptop and a portable console to play lighter AAA games on the go, all for the price of one MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, is the better performance of the Arc G3 Extreme enough to swoon gamers?

We are not sure many gamers would see the appeal of the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+. Yes, there exists a subset of users who can shell out $1,799 for the Claw 8 EX AI+ based on the handheld’s performance. But for the Intel Arc G3 and Arc G3 Extreme to loosen AMD’s chokehold on the Windows handheld gaming console space, Intel and OEMs need to do better. Only a healthy selection of powerful yet affordable handheld consoles will make the kind of difference that Intel is hoping for.