Moving on… and helping to restore our faith in MSI is the fact that after that you will notice the two blowers and their heatpipes. To be blunt, while many first look at the CPU or the GPU, a handheld gaming device’s SoC is rocking… most should be looking at the cooling solution. Thermal limiting of not only these two critically important components is a legit concern… so too is thermal limiting of the M.2 port and other internals a realistic concern. These ‘secondary’ components overheating is the root cause of many a random wild gremlin appearing. Sadly cooling may be critical, but weight is a countervailing priority… as you can easily stick a 4-pound cooling solution on pretty much anything to make it work, but good luck convincing buyers of paying for such an abomination.
This ongoing war of heat vs. weight has no end in sight. Rather, it will always be a delicate balancing act with no right answers. Just a lot of (in retrospect) wrong answers. In this regard, we doubt many will consider MSI’s new Cooler Boost HyperFlow a wrong answer. Possibly not perfect, but rather good overall.
So what makes this dual cooling solution a good answer to this age-old problem? To answer that, let’s briefly go over the ‘traditional’ cooling method for handhelds. The “old (not) reliable” way is to typically suck fresh air in from the back panel and then have hot exhaust out of the top. With said air being forced over/through a vapor chamber + fin array or just a bunch of heat pipes + fin array that are directly attached to the SoC. More modern variants simply mirror that setup and have the center of the heatpipe(s) covering the SoC and simply have both ends of the ‘pipe ending in its own fan+fin cooling array.
Such a setup does a decent, arguably good, job at keeping both low- to moderate-TDP devices happy. Thermal throttling, however, is still a concern once TDPs go above 20 and start heading towards 30-watt territory… but overall it is considered more than ‘Good Enough’ for a handheld gaming device. The problem is they do little to keep a modern storage device from thermally limiting and (in extreme cases) even baking themselves into an early grave. The same goes for the VRM. The same even goes for hot(ish) running IC’s like WiFi 6/7 that were designed around a certain amount of airflow.
With the new Claw, none of the ol’ reliable ways of doing things were going to be good enough. On the cooling side, we are talking a CPU with a short-term boost of up to 45 watts of go juice, and a PL1 that can be set as high as 35 watts… and that beastly BattleMage B390? Add in another 25/37 watts of heat. That is a performance combination that belongs in a “laptop,” not this generation’s version of Sega’s Game Gear (or arguably Genesis Nomad). That is because this is a laptop in a handheld format.
Which is great from a performance perspective, but that’s a looooot of heat to contend with. Thus, the Cooler Boost HyperFlow design was born. In simplistic terms, this is an MSI laptop cooling solution that has been slightly modified to fit into this smaller custom chassis. We say “slightly” as their laptop cooling solutions really required surprisingly little modification. With the biggest being shorter heat pipes… as this is a chunky boy in the Z-axis compared to a laptop but not overly wide nor deep as the typical laptop form factor.
As with a laptop, the two separate and easily individually tuned blowers pull air in from the black bottom of the Claw and then into their own zone of responsibility. With one handling basically the CPU and the other the GPU portion of the SoC. So far, beyond the beefed-up heat pipes, fin array, and fan dimensions… this is pretty much how ASUS does things before pushing the air out the tippy top of their handheld ROG Ally models. Kinda-sorta. Not exactly, as this is the beefiest of beefy cooling solutions. So much so that saying the new CLAW cooler is ‘beefy’ compared to the competition is not doing it justice… as those two oversized fluid dynamic bearing fans are attached to an individual cooling solution that is more than up to the task of handling ~50W of heat. Each. In fact, when both GPU and CPU are set to maximum power and are stressed, the fans are barely audible. More impressive still is that the noise profile they make during gaming sessions is pretty much below what you will notice… and during idling periods? Truly silent (albeit not 0 decibels… as the squirrels in these squirrel cage fans are still running the entire time the unit is on and not in sleep/hibernation mode).
In either case, this is where “same-same but different” ends when drawing comparisons between MSI and ASUS cooler teams’ designs… as this is not a bog-standard “closed loop” air pathway-based cooling solution. No. It is a hybrid. One where both do indeed pull fresh air in from outside the chassis and then have most of that air pushed over cooling fins before exhausting out the top pathway. Key word being most. Not all… as a portion of the squirrel cage housing is not sealed and instead allows some of the high static pressure air to “spill out” and over the “motherboard”.
This tweak does a few things. It not only keeps the entire shell cool in your hands, but it also keeps the WiFi 7 IC from overheating. Allowing for premium wireless connectivity without worries over random heat-related lags ruining your enjoyment. It keeps the back of the LCD screen happy. It keeps the VRM FETs and caps happy. Some of the air even keeps the big battery happy. It even helps keep the microSD Express card (and card reader) happy. Happy devices do not get heatstroke and die. Happy devices do not pause and take a moment to think about it before giving you their all in the performance department. Happy components do all that and do not go on strike, causing random crashes which cost you the boss battle in your game of choice.
More importantly, this active internal airflow allows the new Claw to boast of a feature the competition cannot: active M.2 cooling. Not passive like the competition. To be blunt, the engineering that went into this cooling design is so impressive it alone helps justify the Claw’s asking price. That is how big a deal we consider it. As such… color us highly impressed with the amount of effort MSI’s engineering team put into a feature that most simply went ‘good enough, is good enough’. Put another way this advanced cooling solution will force the competition to change their design and follow suit as it is a (pardon the pun) game changer. One that not only allows for a better user experience… but also allows for noticeably more powerful CPU/GPUs to be used.
Which segues nicely into the next feature MSI gave their handheld that Steam (and earlier, non-X RoGs for that matter) did not: a full-sized M.2 2280 form-factor storage device. Meaning, unlike their actual main competition, it is not only easy but (relatively) cheap to upgrade the storage of the CLAW. While not new to this CLAW gen… the active cooling means that now pretty much any PCIe 4.0 x4 will work with this portable powerhouse and give you all the performance it can.
Though we doubt many will upgrade due to performance issues and will rather upgrade due to capacity issues. In the ‘out of the box’ configuration, MSI has opted for a 1TB Micron 2500. This is the ‘business’ variant of the (RIP) Crucial P310 series. This is the exact same drive they use in many of their laptops. Thus, it is a very decent choice for a handheld device, and we sincerely doubt many will consider it a performance bottleneck.
Instead, the issue we have with it is… it is only 1TB of internal storage with nary a way to add a secondary M.2 drive. So if you need more internal storage, make sure to use a naked version of whatever 2 or 4TB replacement model you opt for… as this is a no-sinks zone. Yes, even if MSI did upsize the z-height of the blowers, there still is not much room here for anything but a naked M.2 2280 drive. Which is a shame.
