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One of my favorite PC trends has been the explosion of gaming handhelds. Even after big names like ASUS and Lenovo entered the market last year with the ROG Ally and Legion Go, more manufacturers continue to join the fray. But with the Claw A1M, MSI is taking the road less traveled by opting for an Intel chip instead of something from AMD. And that has made all the difference, even if many of those changes are not for the better.

Design and display – Straightforward but effective

While MSI may have zagged with the Claw’s processor, its design is incredibly familiar. That’s because aside from being black instead of white, it almost looks like a carbon copy of the ROG Ally. That said, a few subtle changes have a bit of an impact. The Claw’s grips are more pronounced, so it’s more comfortable to hold, while its rear paddles are smaller and located a bit further down so there’s less of a chance you press them by accident.

MSI also opted for Hall effect joysticks, so they are a touch more precise and should wear better over time. However, the springs inside are rather light, so they don’t feel quite as tight as I typically prefer. Unfortunately, while its triggers are nice, the Claw’s bumpers are a bit too spongy.

Meanwhile, nearly the entire rear panel on the Claw is vented to provide ample room for cooling. And along the top there’s a built-in microSD card reader, 3.5mm audio jack, a volume rocker and a single USB-C port with support for Thunderbolt 4. That last one is a very nice inclusion as it’s fast enough to hook up peripherals like an external GPU dock. I just wish there were two of them so I had a spare slot for accessories.

Of course, in the middle there’s a 7-inch 1080p IPS LCD display. It’s relatively colorful and with a tested brightness of around 450 nits, it’s easy to view even in sunnier rooms (though direct sunlight is still an issue). However, aside from a 120Hz refresh rate, there’s not much else going on. There’s no variable refresh rate to help reduce tearing in more modern games and it can’t match the size or more saturated hues of the Legion Go’s 8.8-inch OLED panel. And while this isn’t really a design consideration, with the Claw priced at $750, I wish MSI shipped it with an included case like Lenovo does with the Legion.

Performance – Keeping up, but just barely

Here’s where things get a bit tricky, because at least on paper, the Claw is pretty well-equipped. Our review unit features an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU with Arc graphics, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. There is also a less expensive model with an Intel Core Ultra 5 135H chip and a 512GB SSD. Unfortunately, the Claw’s real-world performance lags behind MSI’s claims and rival handhelds. Back at CES 2024, MSI touted that the Claw would be 20 to 25 percent faster than AMD-based alternatives. But no matter what I do or how much time I spend tweaking settings, I simply can’t produce numbers anywhere in that ballpark.

In Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1280 x 720, high graphics and in Balanced Mode (30 watts), the Claw hit 52 fps, which is slightly behind the 54 fps I got from the ROG Ally at just 15 watts. To make matters a bit worse, those numbers didn’t improve much when I switched to the Claw’s 35-watt Extreme Performance setting, which only bumped the framerate up to 59 fps compared to 60 fps for the Ally when set to 25 watts. So despite running at a higher TDP (total device power), the Claw is just barely keeping up.

It’s a similar story in other titles too. In Cyberpunk 2077 at 720p on medium graphics, the Claw hit 50 fps in Balanced mode, which is the same as the Ally. Finally, in Returnal at 720p on medium, it was essentially a tie again with the Claw hitting 32 fps versus 33 fps for the Ally. Overall, the Claw’s performance isn’t bad, but it’s not as prodigious as MSI promised.

The underlying issue seems to be the Claw’s optimization and graphics drivers. I’ve been using the Claw for about a month, and in that time it’s gotten a ton of updates including two or three BIOS flashes and a seemingly endless number of new graphics drivers. There was even one in late May that boosted performance by as much as 30 percent in some titles. So just imagine how rough performance was at launch earlier this spring.

In some respects, this level of support is reassuring because it shows Intel’s commitment to improving the graphics on its latest chips. That said, the Claw has been on the market since as early as April depending on the market, so it clearly wasn’t ready at launch and its performance continues to be a work in progress.

Battery life – Nothing special

With a 53Wh cell, there was hope the Claw could provide significantly longer runtimes than the Ally and its smaller 40Wh power pack. But because of the Claw’s higher TDP, the difference in real-world longevity isn’t quite as pronounced. When I played Diablo IV on medium graphics, the Claw lasted an hour and 43 minutes, which is 12 minutes better than the Ally’s time of 1:31, but more than 20 minutes less than the Steam Deck’s mark of 2:07.

Software – Clunky at best

One of the biggest issues with Windows-based handhelds is that while they are great for gaming, doing anything else without an external mouse or keyboard can be a chore. Windows 11 generally works as you’d expect, but the MSI Center app feels much less polished. Similar to ASUS’ Armoury Crate, MSI Center is meant to be a one-stop shop for launching games, tweaking settings and downloading updates. And while it works, it just feels clunky. The app often stutters when you open it and I ran into a couple of instances when patches stalled while trying to update software.

Wrap-up

Ultimately, timing may be the Claw’s biggest enemy. If it had come out last year when the ROG Ally and Legion Go hit the market, the Claw may have been a more interesting rival. But ASUS is about to release a successor to the Ally – the Ally X – next month with a completely redesigned chassis, 24GB of RAM and a huge 80Wh battery. That leaves the Claw in a really tight spot. And our top-spec review unit costs $750, which is $100 to $200 more than an equivalent ROG Ally (albeit with half the storage) and has basically the same performance and an almost identical design.

Meanwhile, thanks to recent price cuts, the Claw is also more expensive than the Legion Go, but doesn’t have the OLED screen, kickstand and detachable controllers found in Lenovo’s handheld. This doesn’t even factor in Intel’s drivers, which clearly weren’t ready at launch and even now after multiple updates, don’t offer a significant advantage in performance. But the Claw’s biggest opponent may be MSI itself, because while we’re still waiting on an official release date, the company has already announced a successor in the Claw 8 AI+. The Claw isn’t a bad handheld gaming PC; it just arrived too late and without the tuning it needed.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/msi-claw-a1m-review-a-touch-late-and-bit-too-pricey-143009327.html?src=rss 

I’ve always been a PC guy, even when other content creators were waving MacBooks around. I’ll state up front that I don’t game, so everything I do on a laptop revolves around video editing. To handle that, I use a high-end desktop Windows machine at home and up till recently had a Gigabyte Aero 15X laptop for video editing on the go.

Then, the Aero 15X died. The keyboard stopped working and the Lightning port failed. I didn’t even really mourn the loss — it was always noisy and hot. Battery life was never great, and to do any serious video work, I had to plug it in with a comically large and heavy power brick.

It was time for a new laptop, but I had no intention of reliving my Gigabyte experience. Instead, I wanted a lightweight, powerful and cool computer with long battery life. I needed to edit 4K video on DaVinci Resolve while doing color correction, as well as adding effects and titles. I also do RAW photo editing, so I’d be using Photoshop and Lightroom regularly, too.

I eyed a MacBook Pro M3, but figured it would be too expensive. After checking, I was surprised to find that the gap between the price of a new MacBook Pro and a Windows laptop with similar performance has been less since Apple started using its own Silicon.

So I made the leap and purchased a 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro chip (12-core CPU and 18-core GPU), 36GB of RAM and 512GB of storage. From what I’d read, that would be enough to handle challenging edits. I paid $3,100 in Canada including taxes, with the same machine selling for about $200 less in the US.

I put my new MacBook to work right away when I created a video review of the Nikon Z8 while in Vancouver. Later, I edited a review of the Fujifilm X100 VI in London and did a hands-on video for Panasonic’s S9 camera from Japan. Those projects gave me a good feel for the MacBook’s performance, battery life and usability while on the road.

Back at home, I was curious to compare the MacBook to my desktop PC. While not state-of-the-art, the latter still has impressive specs with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-core CPU, NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti GPU and 64GB of RAM.

I use mirrorless cameras like the Canon EOS R6 II and Panasonic’s S5 II, which output up to 6K 10-bit 4:2:2 Log H.264 or H.265 Quicktime files. Those formats usually tax a computer’s processor and GPU, so I wasn’t expecting real-time playback.

However, I noticed that I could smoothly play those video files in DaVinci Resolve on my MacBook Pro with no rendering or conversion required. I can’t do that on my well-specced desktop PC, so what was going on?

It turns out that even recent NVIDIA and AMD GPUs can’t decode many of those commonly used formats in real time, as systems integrator and benchmark specialist Puget Systems revealed recently. It is doable with some of the formats (not H.264) on newer Intel CPUs with Quick Sync tech on DaVinci Resolve 18 Studio or later.

Real-time playback of 8K H.265 files with multiple color correction nodes? No problem.

The ability to edit these files straight out of the camera was a major quality-of-life improvement, as it eliminated a time- and storage-wasting step.

I also saw real-time playback on my Mac in most circumstances with no rendering. That includes sequences with 6K and 8K video, color correction on most clips, titles, multiple layers, optical-flow time-warping and stabilization.

In contrast, my high-end desktop PC not only requires me to convert my video files but also to enable timeline rendering, particularly with 6K or 8K video. Both of those things take up time and can consume hundreds of gigabytes of disc space.

While the MacBook felt fast, I also wanted to see how it compared to my Windows machine more objectively. I used the PugetBench Creator benchmark suite, which compares performance between machines on commonly used creator apps like Photoshop, Premiere Pro and Davinci Resolve.

Considering my PC didn’t perform as well for video-editing, the results surprised me. The MacBook Pro M3 did come out on top in Photoshop tests, garnering an overall score of 10,076 compared to 7,599 for my desktop PC. That’s largely due to the superior M3 processor.

However, my PC out-benchmarked the MacBook Pro for video-editing by a pretty wide margin, thanks to its faster GPU. The Apple machine saw an overall score of 4,754 on the Premiere Pro PugetBench tests in high power mode, while my PC hit 8,763.

There are no public PugetBench tests yet for DaVinci Resolve, but Puget Systems’ own scores show that high-end PCs handily outperform high-end MacBook Pro models on that app. The PC is generally better when working with RAW formats and easily beats the MacBook Pro for GPU effects, AI features and encoding to H.264 and H.265 formats.

These results show that benchmarks don’t paint a full picture. The relative power of a computer depends on what you’re doing with it, and in my case, the ability to edit certain video formats without rendering outweighed pure speed. However, people who use more effects or work with ProRes or RAW formats may be better off with a powerful PC.

All that said, a lot of the stuff I hated about my Windows laptop had nothing to do with performance. I was often annoyed by my Aero 15X’s weight (if you include the power brick), heat, noise, build quality and relatively useless trackpad.

Since I bought the MacBook Pro 16, I’ve never felt it get overly hot and the fans rarely kick in, even while editing video. By contrast, there’s not a single Windows creator PC I’ve heard of that doesn’t generate excessive heat and fan noise under intensive loads.

Add a second display like this Ricoh portable 150BW model

Another major bonus with the MacBook is that it offers the same performance whether plugged in or not, but the same can’t be said for most PCs. Many throttle down when unplugged, substantially reducing performance.

If you need to edit on the go and don’t have access to AC power, the MacBook wins here as well. While editing on DaVinci Resolve, it can go three to four hours on battery power alone, triple what my Gigabyte laptop could do. And it takes the MacBook Pro just 1.5 hours to get to a full charge, compared to around 2 hours minimum for Dell’s XPS 17 9730. It charges considerably faster, as well.

It’s also less of a grunt to lug than my Aero was, as it weighs a less and the charger is much lighter, too. Finally, the trackpad is much better, to the point that I can even edit videos without a mouse, something I could never say with the Aero or any other PC laptop I’ve owned.

Not all is perfect, as I dislike the webcam notch, but otherwise the MacBook Pro 16 M3 is perfect. As it stands now, Windows laptops using Intel and AMD silicon might be able to match it in performance, but they lag far behind in efficiency. That may change with the new Qualcomm laptops or NVIDIA’s upcoming 5000-series GPUs, but for now, Apple’s products are hard to beat for traveling content creators like me.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-latest-macbook-pro-beats-my-high-end-pc-for-content-creation-130053351.html?src=rss