No, the Claw EX’s true strengths are performance and battery — but even there, the handheld sometimes let me down. I’ve always loved the phrase “potato graphics.”

It’s such a fun way to describe what games look like when your rig is too weak. They’re rough and pasty — like a potato!

— even when running smoothly. Or if you turn up the graphics anyway, you get a “slideshow” because your hardware can’t deliver enough frames.

The first reason I reach for the Claw EX, before any other handheld, is because I don’t automatically get potatoes or slideshow when I fire up demanding PC games. Like my colleague Jay Peters showed you on launch day, the Claw EX makes games look so much sharper than they do on a Steam Deck, and it’s not just the Deck that’s getting beat.

The Xbox Ally X with its AMD Z2 Extreme chip, and the old MSI Claw 8 with Intel Lunar Lake, aren’t playing demanding games smoothly at the 1080p or 1200p resolution of their screens. The Claw EX often can, and I’m seeing around 40 percent more performance than the Xbox Ally X in my tests at 1080p.

16%42Average frame rates at 1080p low. Take the Returnal benches with a grain of salt; the game has issues on Intel.

When I add a little upscaling, I can even start enjoying games I haven’t been able to enjoy handheld because of potato graphics. I could swing lightsabers in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and crack whips in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at good quality with smooth frame rate while binging K-dramas with my spouse.

Until, suddenly, I couldn’t — seemingly because Intel’s drivers aren’t playing nice with some games yet. When my Indy visited the Great Pyramid, the Intel chip would simply not run at the wattage I set, and I found spots where the entire game would repeatedly freeze or even trigger a full system hang.

In Jedi: Survivor, the game is weirdly stuttery in some areas, even though I get far more resolution and smoother frame rate on the Claw EX than the Xbox Ally X. 29%3333 The Claw EX doesn’t always lead at lower 720p resolution!

Here are the average frame rates I saw at low settings. And you should take Returnal benchmark numbers with a grain of salt, because many graphical effects are entirely missing on Intel.

Undergrowth and volumetric fog are barely there; stone objects no longer explode into showers of rock; transparent energy shields are weirdly opaque. The second reason I reach for the Claw EX is that battery life.

Like some of its competitors, it has a big 80 watt-hour pack — but the Intel chip can stretch that battery even further than the competition. Take Cyberpunk 2077, for example.

5 hours. With the new Claw, you can reach that same performance with 21 watts, giving you a whole extra hour on a charge.

Battery life vs. 8h) How fast will it run if I only need a two-hour session at 720p?

What if I want four hours? This table should give you some idea.

4 hours. Or take Balatro, the 2D magic poker game that’s become my best-case battery life test.

5 watts, enough to last 12 whole hours on a charge. It’s rare to get epic battery life for 2D indie games and performance for triple-A ones from a single chip.

But this strength of the Claw EX is flawed, too. When I drain the battery below 15 percent charge with triple-A games, performance dramatically dips.

My chip couldn’t maintain its 25W performance mode and switched to 15W instead. That performance didn’t immediately come back when I plugged the handheld in.

Friends don’t let friends run lightweight games at 120Hz. At 48Hz, you can play this same game five hours longer on a charge.

And though the Claw EX might be the first Windows handheld that properly sleeps and wakes right out of the box, that doesn’t excuse its other Windows woes. I can’t count the number of times I’ve launched a game and been left staring at a black screen, wondering when it’ll finally appear, only to disc over it was already running in the background and didn’t show itself.

I don’t appreciate having to hold down the Task Switcher button to fix a game that didn’t properly launch full-screen, or having to quit out to desktop mode to download the latest Intel drivers. The handheld should really automatically alert me when they’re available.

MSI’s “AI Engine” setting does seem slightly smarter. It’ll generally run games at 25W TDP, but I see it ramping up when loading and downloading to make wait times shorter.

I nearly did a spit take when Windows told me I couldn’t use my handheld’s control panel because, and I quote, “Most of the features in Quick Settings require administration privileges. To use all the features, please switch to an administrator account.”

Thankfully, a reboot fixed that. I instinctively reach for the Claw EX, instead of any other handheld, because I’m borrowing it from Intel instead of paying cash — and because I’m willing to tolerate its idiosyncrasies for fewer potato graphics.

At $1,800, I wouldn’t. Photography by Sean Hollister / The VergeFollow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.

Former OpenAI science lead Kevin Weil has launched Warp Sciences, a new AI startup focused on automating lab work for drug discovery. The company, which trains...