MSI Claw Handheld Comes Clawing Back In Fight Against ASUS’s ROG Ally, Now Up To 30% Faster With Latest BIOS

MSI's Claw handheld has been receiving some decent performance updates with the latest BIOS adding a boost of up to 30%.

Just a month ago, MSI rolled out a new BIOS update for its Claw gaming handheld which added up to 150% more performance and saw significant optimizations across a range of games thanks to the latest Intel Arc driver package. Now a month later, MSI is offering another BIOS update that is going to provide another bump in performance, up to 30% as the company claims.

The new BIOS release for the MSI Claw gaming handheld is titled " E1T41IMS.109 BIOS" (referred to as 109) and comes with an updated MSI Center M 1.0.2405.1401 (referred to as 2405.1401) feature suite too. MSI says that the new BIOS and MSI Center M can be downloaded and installed on your Claw handheld directly from the Live Update function without the need to download the new BIOS separately. The latest MSI Center M suite will also let users know about future updates through the notifications tab so that they don't have to search it themselves manually just to know if there's a new update available or not.

Coming to the performance measurements, compared to the previous BIOS, the latest one for the MSI Claw gaming handheld provides up to a 30% performance increase in Forza Horizon 5 & some significant gains in other titles too such as +23% in Sons of The Forest, +28% in Fortnite, +20% in Helldivers 2, +15.5% in FC24 and +12.9% in Hogwarts Legacy. The company also states that the new BIOS makes the Claw perfect for gaming across 100 of the top most-played games on Steam.

Also, it looks like the added improvements and optimizations for the Claw handheld have made MSI confident enough to share its first public performance comparisons against the ASUS ROG Ally.

The ROG Ally is powered by the AMD Ryzen Z1 series processors while the MSI Claw is powered by Intel Core Ultra chips. These are radically different architectures, both in terms of CPU and GPU, & both have been competing against each other since the Claw launched. Initially, the Claw lacked in first impressions and reviews but based on the latest performance data, it looks like the Claw handheld is now an average of 26% better than the ROG Ally across a range of games.

Now one key metric, the power consumption and battery time, weren't shared but MSI is sharing its suggested settings and configuration to achieve the best gaming performance which can be seen below:

MSI's Claw gaming handheld might have had a rocky start but it looks like the company has clear intends to make the experience better for gamers and it says that it will continue to work on new BIOS updates in the future along with support for new GPU drivers for the Claw. The handheld is also getting some nice discounts across major retailers which will help its case against the ASUS ROG Ally. ASUS on the other hand is already focusing on more premium offerings within its ROG Ally X segment which should launch in the coming months.