Arc G3 Extreme Benchmark Leaks: MSI Claw 8 EX Handheld Outperforms the Ryzen Competition

It was only around a week ago that we reported that Intel was preparing for its partners Panther Lake-based Arc G3 and G3 Extreme gaming handhelds to debut at Computex in early June, and now the first benchmark results have leaked out.

A PassMark test spotted by x86deadandback on Twitter shows that the Arc G3 Extreme, thought to be running on an unannounced MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ handheld, has outperformed the Ryzen Z2 Extreme chipset within the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X by a stiff margin.

Its scores of 4,288 (single-core) and 29,622 (multi-core) put it some distance ahead of the AMD competition, which manages only ~3960 and ~23,600 on average respectively in the same test. That's around an eight percent single-core lead and a more respectable 26 percent gap in the multi-core results. Looking at the graphics portion of the test, there's a 15 percent delta - 55fps for the Intel G3 Extreme and 48fps for the AMD Z2 Extreme.

This is only one early leaked benchmark, of course, but it's still interesting to see that the MSI handheld seems to sport 32GB of 8533MHz LPDDR5X memory, versus the 24GB 8000MHz RAM on the Xbox Ally X, plus a higher core count but slightly lower thread count - 14 cores (2P+8E+4LPE) and 14 threads on the Claw, versus 8 cores (3P+5E) and 16 threads on the Xbox Ally X. For gaming purposes, the Intel silicon also boasts XeSS upscaling and multi-frame generation, lacking on competing RDNA 3.5 processors.

The Claw's 1920x1200 120Hz display and Micron 2500 1TB NVMe SSD are also mentioned in the benchmark results, both of which are typical for a high-end gaming handheld and match the results leaked online by an Italian retailer earlier this week. That retailer has a placeholder price of €1599, a huge figure but perhaps an accurate one given the current RAM and SSD pricing surge.

Computex kicks off on 2nd June, just a month away, so we don't have too much longer to wait until the first official information will be released. It'll be fascinating to see whether the faster of the two Arc chipsets will be able to outperform the Z2 Extreme by that same 15-25 percent margin in actual games, or whether these benchmark results flatter to deceive.