The performance of the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ with the Arc G3 Extreme is excellent, but who wants to pay $1799 for a handheld?

Ever since the launch of Valve's Steam Deck, we've had plenty of portable gaming devices with Windows. Handhelds are still very popular. Thanks to powerful iGPUs, the gaming performance gets higher pretty much every year, but every generation also gets more expensive. While many devices launched for $600-$800 a while back, last year's models already hit the $1000 mark and the new MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ even retails for $1799. 

The current memory crisis definitely impacts the price, because the Claw offers 32 GB RAM as well as a 1 TB SSD. While this was pretty much the standard last year, we are now getting more and more gaming laptops for less than $2000 (obviously depending on the GPU) where you only get 16 GB RAM and a small 512 GB SSD. We even found models with just 8 GB RAM and a 256 GB SSD for more than $1000, which is insane.

The bigger issue, however, is the performance. Even though Intel's first dedicated handheld processor Arc G3 Extreme with the Arc B390 iGPU offers great gaming performance for handhelds, it is still "only" an integrated GPU. In this price range, you can easily get gaming laptops with the GeForce RTX 5060, which is much faster than the Arc B390. For the RRP of the Claw 8, you can actually get a decent gaming laptop (like the Acer Nitro V16 S on Amazon for $1350) and also get a Nintendo Switch 2, for example.

Manufacturers are obviously suffering from high memory prices as well, but the concept of a gaming handheld starts to crumble at these prices. We are not sure many buyers are willing to pay that much for a handheld device. For more information about the new MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, please see our comprehensive review.