I'm going to do something you've never seen before and I'm going to start this
video sponsored by MSI with all of the worst things about the MSI claw 8 AI
plus they went and they took a great
looking product seriously this thing looks outstanding and they went and they
bolted AI on the product name that's it that's kind of all I got
because on paper the claw 8 AI plus is a
huge upgrade over the original MSI claw
for starters look at that screen it's
eight flipping Ines and those bezels man
pretty small all right let's do a quick external tour here we got a whole lot of
nothing on the bottom at the top that's right not one but two Thunderbolt four
ports meaning that you could use this thing as a fully fledged PC with a
Thunderbolt dock we've got our volume controls headphone jack power button
with fingerprint sensor pretty nice feeling shoulder and
triggers she is a little bit on the heavier side but I promise the heft
comes with some benefits because inside this thing is equipped with Intel's new
lunar L core Ultra 7258 V that means on
top of having Intel's latest CPU architecture it uses their new ark battl
Mage GPU which means that the claw has gone from clawing its way toward the
competition to clawing the competition
this thing looks absolutely flipping outstanding by the way I missed there's
a Micro SD slot at the top on the back
we've got a couple of paddle buttons as well as ample cooling intakes for the
dual fan cooler nice contoured grip and
on the front we've got a couple of what look like nearly full-size joysticks oh
that feels like a much improved d-pad
Xbox style face buttons and of course Xbox style buttons as well as a couple
buttons that we'll figure out what they do once we get this thing fired up shall we while it's booting up let's take a
look at what's in the box we've got not much there's a quick start guide and a
65 W charger with integrated cable not my preferred style of charger but hey at
least there's a charger in the Box oh this is fun okay sorry we will fire it
up in a second but first I want to show you guys the easy access SSD upgrade
slot I'm just going to open that up with my LTT Precision screw driver set LTD
store.com that's right MSI you can sponsor the video but you can't make me
stop including my own stuff while we're opening it up why don't we talk specs
she's got 32 gigs of LP ddr5x memory
running at a whopping 85 33 megat transfers per second which is really
important for both the system responsiveness as well as GPU
performance because when you've got an integrated graphics card of course it's
going to be using your system memory as vram So the faster the
better there she goes it is a 30 mm m.2
so you're not going to be be able to put a full siiz one in there but it is easy
to access and it's 1 Tab out of the box what else is in here we've got
integrated y57 and Bluetooth 5.4 we've
got their new intra flow thermal design which helps keep everything cool not
just the CPU and integrated Arc GPU
we've got a gigantic battery that's a big contributor to the
795 G weight that thing is 80 wat hours
and MSI claims that they can get over 20
hours of battery life in endurance mode playing back video we didn't quite match
that we ended up at around 17 hours but we tested it under different conditions
and I got to say 17 hours is still a really impressive result oh that's still
on uh especially when you consider that
it Powers a larger screen than other similar devices of course you guys are
far less concerned with how long you can watch videos on it you guys are more
concerned with gaming and MSI claims up to 4 hours gaming on low settings and we
got nearly 2 hours under a torture test
worst case scenario so I actually find that to be quite believable now let's
flip things over and have a look at the screen I already told you guys it's 8 in
so it's obviously flipping huge but it's even bigger than you would think because
it's 16 by10 aspect ratio 1920 x 1200 so
that is a larger 8 in display than if it was 16x9 in fact it's 37% larger than
the original claw it also Al hits up to 500 nits Peak brightness according to
MSI and runs it up to 120 HZ with
support for variable refresh rate that is a really nice display on a mobile
gaming device they completely retooled their software so you can go in there
and make adjustments to your power profile for instance you can here
actually let's get let's get it fired up here you can change your controller scheme you can adjust your RGB we got
this AI engine thing here which as far as we can tell tries to kind of adjust
the system settings depending on what applications you're running in practice
we actually find it's better to just set the TDP in screen brightness according
to your preference but hey AI oh which actually reminds me I am contractually
obligated to tell you guys that with a dock right like Thunderbolt connect to a
monitor egpu doc whatever you want this
could be one of the most affordable co-pilot plus PCS truly ready for the AI
age oh man dude this is flipping wild so
you can adjust your TTP you can adjust your fan speed obviously 8 watts is going to give you
the longest battery life and 30 WTS is going to give you the most performance
but this is wild at 17 Watts we found in
almost every scenario everything other than rocket League the new claw 8 AI
plus outperformed the original claw even
when the original claw was at 35
Watts had half the
power yes that's what this kind of
battle mage efficiency is going to do for you flipping exciting too bad Pat
Ginger isn't here to see it rest in peace Pat he's actually alive but pray
for him man this screen is big it's not
the biggest screen on a portable gaming device but I think it's about as big as
I would say is practical no I missed God
I suck at this game I am like unbearably
bad at this game one thing I can say for sure is that it's not msi's fault that I
suck they've upgraded the holifa analogs to and triggers they've upgraded the lb
and the RB buttons they have upgraded the d-pad which actually does feel a lot
better now you're definitely going to enjoy best if you have bigger hands my
tiny hands MSI thank you for putting
these ribs down here so you can kind of rest your fingers anywhere you want so
there's kind of a spot to put your small fies if you KN and a spot to put your
bigger fies if you're someone else um
but it's it's definitely a heftier device oh we haven't even tried the
speakers
yet almost no Distortion at full volume
they don't have the highest level of clarity that I've ever seen but just by
Merit of being forward- facing they sound pretty darn decent and they do
shockingly well in the Lowe's MSI apparently upgraded the rubber for the
speakers so make of that what you will now that's everything that I absolutely
have to cover which means now I just get to play games let's fire up a class CL
Shadow the Tomb Raider here we go man that's a big screen I didn't even notice
when we were playing rocket League which
means that cooling solution she's
quiet not just that but this machine
runs so much cooler than the last generation one we kind of couldn't
believe it check out these numbers from the lab really impressive okay total
power 24 Watts 23 Watts
355 FPS now obviously you're like oh Shadow
the Tomb Raider that's an old game 35 FPS yeah but my friends check this out
it's cranked is that wild or
what like seriously you guys if I turn this down to medium okay I turn this
down to medium now I'm getting over 40
FPS that is freaking crazy like yeah
it's an older AAA game but this is like a real game you know there's no there's
no Super Meat Boy and on a screen this size you really don't need to crank all
the details you don't even need to crank the
resolution like running this at a man 8
in display 720p might be a little low but I bet you could get away with like
900p all right I see super sampling as
well sure yeah why not let's go quality
the smaller the screen the less you're bound to notice something like super
sampling not bad not bad this is wild man if you'd
shown this to me like a few years ago
I've been like nah isn't how quiet that is I'm running a AAA freaking game right
now can you even hear that
Andy as soon as you've got game audio on you are going to literally completely
forget about
it oh I haven't even mentioned there's another version there is a 7in version
that's $100 cheaper has a smaller battery and obviously doesn't have the
same screen it's 7 in and it's 1920 x
1080 I think this is the more compelling version personally but I leave that up
to you oo tape to tape let's go this is
such a great device to play a game like this screen a tiny bit no I can't dim
the screen I like it bright yes I'll dim the screen give me a sec here's a fun
fact by the way while I turned down the brightness these quick settings are just
part of the Xbox game bar see that so
there's all kinds of other functions in here as well oh no they got us chasing
oh here we go I'm on the Breakaway I'm on the Breakaway oh come on uh okay
sorry I can turn down a bit there you good now that we're down to like 30%
Andy yeah let's
go man there's no way I need 17 Watts for this okay hold on a second oh yeah
okay yeah I would like to see instead of
having settings sort of change which
settings are here um I'd like it to like
open up a deeper settings menu or I mean realistically I don't even need that I
just need to be able to switch between all the different ones here like i' I'd
like to have like my just give me the tdps just give me the just tell me how
many just tell me how many watts it is I think that's what I would probably
prefer I mean maybe that's not the best for like a more mainstream user but
your mileage may vary just my T my manual TDP modes in game that's what I'd
like to be able to do just so that if I don't launch the right one before I'm in
game I can just quickly change it after the fact oh man I got to spend less time
trying to talk about this thing and I got to spend more time trying to win this game here where is everybody guys
there's no line change just oh follow me
up the ice see finally someone joins The Rush with
me that's how we do it like any piece of
gaming Hardware it's not going to make you a better gamer but I guess the
endorsement that I can give it is the claw won't make you a worse gamer that's
for sure this thing rocks uh while we
wait for this to load I'd love to see MSI introduced a TDP option between 17
watts and 30 Watts we found 17 Watts
even in not the most demanding titles we saw the odd frame pacing issue it's
probable that this can be addressed in drivers but it would just be nice to
have an in between cuz 30
Watts great in some cases just Overkill so I'd love to have like a 25 watt or
like a 22 watt was my CPU at
100% I mean yeah it kind of checks out
GPU at 96% the really impressive thing is that
it's still not loud can you hear it can
you see how close I am to the mic like that is that's too close you're not
supposed to measure noise from that distance but like I have to get it that
closer you're not going to hear it at all so you throw on a little bit of music and you're vibing that's an
advantage of building a bigger device so yeah you get a little bit more weight
you get a little bit more heft but you also get more room to put fat Cooling in
it and a fat battery there is one uncomfortable part of this conversation
how much is a claw 8 AI well
$900 thanks for watching ShortCircuit