The Performance and Experience of MSI Claw with NVIDIA EGPU

In my testing, I've consistently seen frame rates ranging from 32 to 36 FPS, which is about the maximum when using Oculink. However, it's worth noting that the built-in Benchmark for Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 did a pretty decent job with high settings, averaging around 98 FPS. Interestingly, when FSR was enabled, I saw an average of around 94 FPS, despite not using any scaling. This suggests that the NVIDIA EGPU is capable of delivering strong performance in this game.

One game that I've had really good luck with using an EGPU is Forspoken. In high settings and on 1080p, I was able to maintain an average frame rate of around 98 FPS, which is quite impressive. This experience has been consistent across different EGPU configurations, including the MSI Claw.

However, there are some games that don't seem to like the NVIDIA EGPU. One example is Shadow of the Tomb Raider, where I experienced a black screen with sound effects still audible during the benchmark test. It's unclear whether this is an ongoing issue or a one-time problem, but it's worth noting for potential users.

In contrast, Hell Divers 2 ran smoothly at 1080p High settings on the MSI Claw without any issues. This suggests that the EGPU configuration can handle demanding games with ease.

Another game that I've had difficulty running well on the MSI Claw is Spider-Man Miles Morales. Despite using a USB 4 or Thunderbolt EGPU, I experienced poor performance and couldn't achieve over 60 FPS. This may be due to the game's specific requirements or limitations in the EGPU configuration.

On the other hand, Cyberpunk 2077 performed relatively well on the MSI Claw, with average frame rates ranging from 30-40 FPS at 1080p High settings. However, I did notice more stutters compared to other games tested.

The performance of the MSI Claw can vary depending on the specific EGPU configuration used. In some benchmarks, the cheaper version (135H) performed better than the higher-end version (155H). This highlights the importance of choosing the right EGPU configuration for your needs and budget.

It's worth noting that I've found the NVIDIA EGPU to perform well in handheld mode when running games at lower wattages. The MSI Claw is designed to be portable, and it's essential to consider battery life and performance in this context.

In summary, the NVIDIA EGPU on the MSI Claw offers strong performance in various games, but there are some titles that don't run as smoothly as others. Battery life is also a consideration when using an EGPU in handheld mode.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again recently MSI released their brand new handheld known as the MSI claw and performance has been a bit lackluster since the launch a few days ago here on the channel we've actually taken a look at both of the variants they offer one with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155h and The Core Ultra 5 135h you know with the new igpu from Intel I think there's a lot of optimizations that need to be had but in this video I figured we'd just go ahead and up the performance using an external GP U now one great feature that the MSI claw has built in is Thunderbolt 4 or USB 4 that way we can easily connect an egpu and there's some really nice ones out there on the market right now but for this video we're going to be using the new 1X GPU you could also go with the GPD G1 they've got the same GPU different enclosure this one does have a few more features like the fact that we can actually add an extra M do 2 nvme SSD in the bottom here lots of extra I/O and this actually works over us P4 Thunderbolt 3 Thunderbolt 4 or even oculink unfortunately the MSI claw doesn't have oculink but we can still up that graphics performance by adding one of these to it and once we connect this basically what we're going to have here is a Radeon RX 7600 MXT connected to the MSI claw we can game on a larger monitor if you want to game on the internal screen will cut that performance down a bit that's just how egpus work over Thunderbolt or USB 4 but connecting to a larger screen is definitely the the way to go so I've got the 1X GPU connected to my monitor we've got our USB 4 or Thunderbolt 4 cable right here uh it's going to be connected over HDMI to that external display and basically we're just going to plug the MSI claw right in we've got that Thunderbolt 4port right up top now I've already installed the AMD driver all you really need to do is head over to the website and download the correct driver remember we've got the Radeon RX 7600 MXT now another cool feature that we have here with the 1X GPU is the fact that we've got a turbo boost button up front we've also got some adjustable RGB but that turbo boost button does come in handy because with it enabled this GPU will run it up to 120 watts giving us much better performance now it would have been really awesome if MSI added an uling Port here because uh USB 4 or Thunderbolt 4 will only run it up to 40 gigs and we do have a 40 gig protocol Thunderbolt 4 Port here so performance will be cut down as if we were to plug this into something that was much faster but it's still going to outperform that it GPU okay got everything set up and uh real quick I just want to give you a look here from MSI Center which is the control center built in with that MSI claw we've got our performance profile I'm going to be in Extreme Performance so this can boost up to around 40 to 43 Watts every once in a while while gaming we don't have to worry about battery cuz we're plugged into the egpu sitting plenty of power over there another thing I mentioned here was that uh 7600 MXT can run it up to 100 120 watts and right here you can see got a real nice clock on it we're at 100 106 some games can Max this out but uh yeah up to 120 watts with this external GPU not too bad so far everything's been working really well we've got our AMD x connect technology and we've got access to AMD software so we can enable hyper RX or radon super resolution if we need it I don't think we will with this but again we're not running this GPU at the maximum performance because we're running over USB 4 but so far I've been seeing some decent performance out of this little setup and uh one thing I actually like to do when I connect egpus is disable the internal igpu and some games will autod detect and go right to that igpu with all of my testing I did disable the AR igpu plus with that off we don't have to worry about background tasks using that GPU taking power from the CPU so in performance mode with this setup again we can boost up to 40 Watts on that GPU 120 on the external GPU and the first thing we've got here are some benchmarks and the first one we have here is 3D Mark night raid with that egpu connected we get a total score of 46,4 just to give you an idea on the igpu with the 155h and the MSI claw this scored a 23, 957 so we've got a nice jump in performance there checking out fire strike with the egpu 19518 without 8,320 and finally time spy with a really impressive 9,937 and just on the igpu 3,677 needless to say we can definitely expect a big boost in gaming performance so uh let's go ahead and move over there now first up we've got Doom Eternal 1080p high and I've always had really good luck with egpus in this game now uh there are some games that just don't like egpus and we'll take a look at one of them that I recently found but just to give you an idea uh Spider-Man Miles Morales and Spider-Man remaster just don't like egpus connected over Thunderbolt or USB 4 oculink usually works out really well higher band with but we get a lot of stutters with some games using USB 4 and Thunderbolt here's po world at 1080p High whenever I hit a creature for the first couple times I did get a major stutter and I think it's kind of Shader caches going on with this game we don't have access to FSR you know without a mod for the game itself just yet and you know with the 7600 MXT properly connected in a laptop or something like that we're not going to have any issues but again we're not using this GPU to its full potential because we've only got 40 gigs of bandwidth and even then we really don't have 40 gigs because uh Thunderbolt 4 in all of my testing I'm usually around 32 to 36 that's about the maximum if we using oculink we could do up to 63 Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 using the built-in Benchmark did a pretty decent job with high settings looks like we're getting an average of around 98 FPS but we do have some FSR enabled I just used the preset I wasn't sure if FSR would even come up and yet did kind of downscale it a bit fors of horizon 5 is one of those games I've actually had really good luck with using egpus either Thunderbolt or oculink never really had an issue and uh right now we're at high 1080p no extra scaling so we're not using FSR or anything like that by the end we had an average of 94 FPS I'm pretty sure we could do 1440 with this but we would have to drop some of the settings down now I know for a fact that even over oculink with this egpu we can run this game at high 1440 over 60 FPS but since we're using Thunderbolt might take some of that performance away here's hell divers 2 1080p High settings and I haven't been able to test this with an egpu yet but it doesn't look like it really likes them another game that I always have issues with is Spider-Man Miles Morales Spider-Man remaster using a USB 4 or Thunderbolt egpu does result in some pretty bad performance and right now I mean with this setup we should be getting well over 60 but unfortunately it's just not working out very well and finally we've got cyberpunk 2077 now this one's hit or miss so sometimes I see great performance sometimes it kind of falls on its face but it looks like right now I mean it's decent we're at 1080p high on this setup but I did notice a lot more stutters with this game than I did with the other games that we tested so far another one I wanted to run a benchmark with was a shadow of the Tomb Raider but halfway through the Benchmark it would just give me a black screen I could hear the sound in the background and I think that was about the first time I've ever tested it on an egpu so I'm not sure if that's kind of an ongoing problem or not but yeah obviously connecting an egpu to the MSI claw does work out pretty well and I'm expecting some more driver updates from MSI and Intel but so far we're not seeing great performance out of the MSI claw in handheld mode be it the 135h version or the 155h version in fact uh in some benchmarks in games we're getting better performance out of the cheaper version some benchmarks in games the higher-end version with that 155h beats it out there's really no clear winner here and uh until we get some more optimizations some more driver updates from MSI it's really hard to recommend the MSI claw over the others on the market right now personally I would just go with a steam deck or a steam deck OLED but if you got to have that Windows Experience the Rog Ally does outperform this at lower wattages and I'll tell you I've done a lot of testing with the core Ultra CPUs if I was able to take this up to 65 Watts we could outperform the Rog Ally but then we're only going to get like 40 minutes of battery life maybe less than that what I found is you know we've got a lot of cores here this 155h has 16 cores and 22 threads it's kind of unnecessary for a handheld we don't need that many for gaming the igpu here can do a great job at higher wattages but you know when it's in a handheld form factor and we're trying to get good battery life running this at 15 watts like the steam deck it's just not going to perform well at all if you're interested in checking out the other videos I made on the MSI claw I'll leave links down below we've got that 135h first look the one 55h first look next one I want to do is just kind of a benchmark comparison between the Rog Ally and the MSI claw given that they both run Windows it'd be really easy to kind of run the same benchmarks on either of them and see which one really comes out ahead in battery life and overall performance but that's going to wrap it up for this video I really appreciate you watching it'd be really cool if you could hit that like button or think about subscribing to the channel because I've got more coming and if there's anything else you want to see running on the MSI claw just let me know in the comments below but that's it for this one and like always thanks for watching ehey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again recently MSI released their brand new handheld known as the MSI claw and performance has been a bit lackluster since the launch a few days ago here on the channel we've actually taken a look at both of the variants they offer one with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155h and The Core Ultra 5 135h you know with the new igpu from Intel I think there's a lot of optimizations that need to be had but in this video I figured we'd just go ahead and up the performance using an external GP U now one great feature that the MSI claw has built in is Thunderbolt 4 or USB 4 that way we can easily connect an egpu and there's some really nice ones out there on the market right now but for this video we're going to be using the new 1X GPU you could also go with the GPD G1 they've got the same GPU different enclosure this one does have a few more features like the fact that we can actually add an extra M do 2 nvme SSD in the bottom here lots of extra I/O and this actually works over us P4 Thunderbolt 3 Thunderbolt 4 or even oculink unfortunately the MSI claw doesn't have oculink but we can still up that graphics performance by adding one of these to it and once we connect this basically what we're going to have here is a Radeon RX 7600 MXT connected to the MSI claw we can game on a larger monitor if you want to game on the internal screen will cut that performance down a bit that's just how egpus work over Thunderbolt or USB 4 but connecting to a larger screen is definitely the the way to go so I've got the 1X GPU connected to my monitor we've got our USB 4 or Thunderbolt 4 cable right here uh it's going to be connected over HDMI to that external display and basically we're just going to plug the MSI claw right in we've got that Thunderbolt 4port right up top now I've already installed the AMD driver all you really need to do is head over to the website and download the correct driver remember we've got the Radeon RX 7600 MXT now another cool feature that we have here with the 1X GPU is the fact that we've got a turbo boost button up front we've also got some adjustable RGB but that turbo boost button does come in handy because with it enabled this GPU will run it up to 120 watts giving us much better performance now it would have been really awesome if MSI added an uling Port here because uh USB 4 or Thunderbolt 4 will only run it up to 40 gigs and we do have a 40 gig protocol Thunderbolt 4 Port here so performance will be cut down as if we were to plug this into something that was much faster but it's still going to outperform that it GPU okay got everything set up and uh real quick I just want to give you a look here from MSI Center which is the control center built in with that MSI claw we've got our performance profile I'm going to be in Extreme Performance so this can boost up to around 40 to 43 Watts every once in a while while gaming we don't have to worry about battery cuz we're plugged into the egpu sitting plenty of power over there another thing I mentioned here was that uh 7600 MXT can run it up to 100 120 watts and right here you can see got a real nice clock on it we're at 100 106 some games can Max this out but uh yeah up to 120 watts with this external GPU not too bad so far everything's been working really well we've got our AMD x connect technology and we've got access to AMD software so we can enable hyper RX or radon super resolution if we need it I don't think we will with this but again we're not running this GPU at the maximum performance because we're running over USB 4 but so far I've been seeing some decent performance out of this little setup and uh one thing I actually like to do when I connect egpus is disable the internal igpu and some games will autod detect and go right to that igpu with all of my testing I did disable the AR igpu plus with that off we don't have to worry about background tasks using that GPU taking power from the CPU so in performance mode with this setup again we can boost up to 40 Watts on that GPU 120 on the external GPU and the first thing we've got here are some benchmarks and the first one we have here is 3D Mark night raid with that egpu connected we get a total score of 46,4 just to give you an idea on the igpu with the 155h and the MSI claw this scored a 23, 957 so we've got a nice jump in performance there checking out fire strike with the egpu 19518 without 8,320 and finally time spy with a really impressive 9,937 and just on the igpu 3,677 needless to say we can definitely expect a big boost in gaming performance so uh let's go ahead and move over there now first up we've got Doom Eternal 1080p high and I've always had really good luck with egpus in this game now uh there are some games that just don't like egpus and we'll take a look at one of them that I recently found but just to give you an idea uh Spider-Man Miles Morales and Spider-Man remaster just don't like egpus connected over Thunderbolt or USB 4 oculink usually works out really well higher band with but we get a lot of stutters with some games using USB 4 and Thunderbolt here's po world at 1080p High whenever I hit a creature for the first couple times I did get a major stutter and I think it's kind of Shader caches going on with this game we don't have access to FSR you know without a mod for the game itself just yet and you know with the 7600 MXT properly connected in a laptop or something like that we're not going to have any issues but again we're not using this GPU to its full potential because we've only got 40 gigs of bandwidth and even then we really don't have 40 gigs because uh Thunderbolt 4 in all of my testing I'm usually around 32 to 36 that's about the maximum if we using oculink we could do up to 63 Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 using the built-in Benchmark did a pretty decent job with high settings looks like we're getting an average of around 98 FPS but we do have some FSR enabled I just used the preset I wasn't sure if FSR would even come up and yet did kind of downscale it a bit fors of horizon 5 is one of those games I've actually had really good luck with using egpus either Thunderbolt or oculink never really had an issue and uh right now we're at high 1080p no extra scaling so we're not using FSR or anything like that by the end we had an average of 94 FPS I'm pretty sure we could do 1440 with this but we would have to drop some of the settings down now I know for a fact that even over oculink with this egpu we can run this game at high 1440 over 60 FPS but since we're using Thunderbolt might take some of that performance away here's hell divers 2 1080p High settings and I haven't been able to test this with an egpu yet but it doesn't look like it really likes them another game that I always have issues with is Spider-Man Miles Morales Spider-Man remaster using a USB 4 or Thunderbolt egpu does result in some pretty bad performance and right now I mean with this setup we should be getting well over 60 but unfortunately it's just not working out very well and finally we've got cyberpunk 2077 now this one's hit or miss so sometimes I see great performance sometimes it kind of falls on its face but it looks like right now I mean it's decent we're at 1080p high on this setup but I did notice a lot more stutters with this game than I did with the other games that we tested so far another one I wanted to run a benchmark with was a shadow of the Tomb Raider but halfway through the Benchmark it would just give me a black screen I could hear the sound in the background and I think that was about the first time I've ever tested it on an egpu so I'm not sure if that's kind of an ongoing problem or not but yeah obviously connecting an egpu to the MSI claw does work out pretty well and I'm expecting some more driver updates from MSI and Intel but so far we're not seeing great performance out of the MSI claw in handheld mode be it the 135h version or the 155h version in fact uh in some benchmarks in games we're getting better performance out of the cheaper version some benchmarks in games the higher-end version with that 155h beats it out there's really no clear winner here and uh until we get some more optimizations some more driver updates from MSI it's really hard to recommend the MSI claw over the others on the market right now personally I would just go with a steam deck or a steam deck OLED but if you got to have that Windows Experience the Rog Ally does outperform this at lower wattages and I'll tell you I've done a lot of testing with the core Ultra CPUs if I was able to take this up to 65 Watts we could outperform the Rog Ally but then we're only going to get like 40 minutes of battery life maybe less than that what I found is you know we've got a lot of cores here this 155h has 16 cores and 22 threads it's kind of unnecessary for a handheld we don't need that many for gaming the igpu here can do a great job at higher wattages but you know when it's in a handheld form factor and we're trying to get good battery life running this at 15 watts like the steam deck it's just not going to perform well at all if you're interested in checking out the other videos I made on the MSI claw I'll leave links down below we've got that 135h first look the one 55h first look next one I want to do is just kind of a benchmark comparison between the Rog Ally and the MSI claw given that they both run Windows it'd be really easy to kind of run the same benchmarks on either of them and see which one really comes out ahead in battery life and overall performance but that's going to wrap it up for this video I really appreciate you watching it'd be really cool if you could hit that like button or think about subscribing to the channel because I've got more coming and if there's anything else you want to see running on the MSI claw just let me know in the comments below but that's it for this one and like always thanks for watching e\n"