MSI Claw puts up another fight against Asus ROG Ally with new BIOS and M Center update

The Intel Meteor Lake gaming handheld MSI Claw just got another BIOS update. This time, it tags along with an MSI Center M update. The company says that these two offer a performance boost of up to 30%. These two updates are also said to make the device capable of running all the top 100 popular Steam games smoothly.

At launch, the MSI Claw lagged way behind the popular Asus ROG Ally. However, after the gaming handheld hit the market, we started to see different benchmark results pretty much every week. It almost felt like the company rushed out an unfinished product and is improving it as time goes by.

Of course, Intel was partly to blame as, at launch, the Intel Meteor Lake iGPU drivers couldn't even make Xe-LPG Arc GPUs perform as expected. Later driver updates noticeably improved the gaming performance, and MSI Claw also benefited from the 101.5333 driver update released last month.

This time, MSI is promising another performance boost with BIOS version E1T41IMS.109 and MSI Center M 1.0.2405.1401. As the company shared, these two make some popular titles see a noticeable performance boost. For example, Forza Horizon 5 jumps from 59.4 average FPS to 77.5, Fortnite from 62.12 to 87.3, and Helldivers 2 from 50.2 to 62.8. There are many other games that have enjoyed the FPS boost, which you can check out from the chart attached at the end.

MSI also claims that the Claw can now offer "superior performance" compared to competitors such as ROG Ally (Z1 Extreme curr. $599.99 on Best Buy). The thing about this claim is that it lacks detailed information, and the company is likely comparing the performance with the non-Extreme Ryzen Z1 variant.

Still, if a BIOS update and new software version can offer such a performance boost, it means that the MSI Claw still has room for improvement.