MSI Claw A8: Now With AMD Inside

MSI’s not giving up on the handheld race just yet. After the first Claw struggled to capture the attention of the handheld community, they’re back clawing with the Claw A8, and this time they’ve ditched Intel’s chips for AMD’s shiny new Ryzen Z2 Extreme. Smart move? Probably.

So what’s new? For starters, it’s got an 8-inch Full HD display with a 120Hz refresh rate. That’s pretty slick, and big enough to make it feel more like a compact gaming laptop than a typical handheld — minus the keyboard, of course. It also packs up to 24GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB M.2 SSD, which should be enough for most.

Design-wise, you now get it in white and lime green, because apparently someone at MSI thought “what if the Hulk ran a tech startup?” And honestly, I kind of like it.

The big story here is really the chip swap. The original Claw was running Intel’s Meteor Lake, which… yeah, wasn’t winning any awards. People had issues with compatibility and battery life. AMD’s Z2 Extreme should help fix that, or at least make it suck less. Fingers crossed.

No official price yet, and no release date either, which is classic MSI. But they showed it off at Computex 2025, so expect to see it pop up in stores in the coming months.

Will it be a challenger to the ROG Ally X, Steam Deck, or even AYANEO’s endless stream of handhelds? Who knows. But hey, credit to MSI for trying again — and actually listening to feedback.

We will be adding the MSI Claw A8 to our handheld list soon.

Leave a Comment