Portable consoles are on a roll. After the Steam Deck, ASUS launched its ROG Ally, followed by Lenovo with the Legion GO. Finally, earlier this year, MSI presented its Claw at CES. However, the console is available in several versions, one with a Core Ultra 5 135H, the other with a Core Ultra 7 155H. But bigger CPUs don’t mean better performance!
MSI Claw: the biggest CPU isn’t necessarily the best!
For its tests, videographer Retro Tech Dad invested heavily in four consoles: the MSI versions in Core Ultra 5 135H and Core Ultra 7 155H, as well as the ROG Ally in Z1 and Z1 Extreme.
In fact, the two MSI consoles behave quite similarly in games. Indeed, the only notable difference between an Ultra 5 135H and an Ultra 7 155H comes from theiGPU (and two fewer cores for the Ultra 5). The Ultra 5 lacks a single Xe core. As you can see, with a larger CPU, the console finds itself GPU-limited, which is why the two models offer equivalent gaming performance. In synthetic benchmarks, performance is more marked, but this type of console is aimed at gamers.
Things are different for the ROG Ally. The version equipped with a Ryzen Z1 processor features graphics with 4 Compute Units, compared with 12 for the Z1 Extreme. Naturally, the difference in configuration is significant and the performance gain perceptible.
In view of the results obtained, it’s best to opt for the smaller Claw, with the Ultra 5 135H. This will save you around €200. Even if you upgrade the SSD to a 1TB M.2 2230 model, you’ll still save around €100 compared with the Ultra 5 model. It’s worth noting that, apart from storage size and CPU, the two machines are identical!
