One of the most painful aspects of the memory crisis has been the fall of our previous best budget gaming handheld, the Steam Deck. With the LCD model now gone from Valve's store pages, what we're left with is OLED models starting at $789 for the 512 GB version.
And yes, the Steam Deck OLED is a lovely thing. But the AMD APU inside is showing its age now, and it'd be nice if that was reflected in the price. Hunting through the listings, though, I've found this MSI Claw A1M at Best Buy for $563—and at this price, I'd pick it over Valve's machine without a second thought.
This model's got the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H tucked inside, a Meteor Lake-era processor with eight Xe cores handling the graphics duties. That's the same number you get in the Core Ultra 7 165H, and while it's not the most impressive of graphics-munching chips, it should still do fine with your handheld gaming staples.
Sure, you don't get a fancy OLED screen. The seven-inch, 120 Hz, 1080p panel in the Claw looks pretty good though, so I wouldn't feel too shortchanged there. You also get 16 GB of LPDDR5x, and lord have mercy, a proper 1 TB SSD for plenty of game installs. It's also a Windows 11 native machine, but you could always cram SteamOS on it with a bit of fiddling.
Now, let me make things clear—The OG MSI Claw gets overtaken considerably in the performance stakes by the newer models, the Claw 8 AI+ A2VM and the Claw 8 EX AI+ CG3EM. And many other handhelds, too. But when the later MSI models are still $1,000+, and the handheld gaming PC market is still wracked by memory-induced price increases, this machine makes a whole lot of sense for this kind of money.
Sure, it's not exactly a graphics powerhouse. But neither is the Steam Deck, and it does very well as long as you keep your expectations reasonable. And while the ROG Xbox Ally (non-X) is also very tempting at $599, I think I'd want more than 512 GB of storage. For this sort of cash, I'd be saving some pennies and picking up the Claw instead—and I think you should give it some serious consideration, too.
👉Take a look at all the Best Buy handheld gaming PC deals here👈
1. Best overall:
Asus ROG Xbox Ally X
2. Best budget:
Asus ROG Xbox Ally
3. Best high performance:
MSI Claw 8 EX AI+
