Computer Gaming Hardware for New Parents — What You REALLY Need to Know
Nothing quite prepares you for how your life changes when your first child is born. The joke is “say goodbye to sleeping,” but this is not always true. It’s also casting a net that is not nearly wide enough.
Perhaps the biggest change comes down to availability. There are times when your child needs you, and the other parent will not do. You end up permanently on-call. Your life comes to revolve around your child, and rightly so. If you spend any serious amount of time gaming, this can upend your hobbies. But, it does not need to kill them.
Most computer gaming tends to be done on desktop computers. The reason for this is simple: a desktop is better at handling heat, permitting it to use more powerful components, and can be upgraded. If a graphics card fails or becomes obsolete, it can be replaced with ease. This is fine for gamers without children, whose primary concern is whether their hardware can run the games they want to play. But for a new parent, hardware power becomes secondary to two new concerns: portability and durability.
Or, put another way, your gaming hardware not only has to be able to run your games, but it also has to be able to go whether your child is, and survive a close encounter with them. Your days of being able to hole up in a home office or “man cave” and play Call of Duty are done.
Gaming laptops have existed for a long time, and at first glance, they appear to be a good solution. Being laptops, they solve the problem of portability — they can go wherever you need to go to be available for your child. But, for new parents, they have their problems.
The primary enemy of any laptop is heat. The biggest difference between a laptop built to last and one that will fail after a couple of years comes down whether it can handle the heat its components will generate. In gaming laptops, which tend to use microprocessors and GPUs closer to a desktop in power and heat generation, this is all-important. A gaming laptop that cannot get rid of heat can bake itself in a matter of months. As such, some of the most sophisticated cooling systems around can be found in gaming laptops. Portability and running graphics intensive games do not tend to be a problem.
The same cannot be said for being pulled off a table by a toddler and being sent crashing to the floor. And when you are a new parent, it is not a question of whether this will happen to your laptop, it is more a question of when.
When a toddler does this, it is not really their fault. Infants and toddlers are exploring the world for the first time — in many respects, they learn how it works through experimentation. This can mean anything from holding an object and examining it from every possible angle to putting it in their mouth to banging it against a table. Combined with generally poor impulse control (something children learn over time, but don’t tend to have in their first couple of years of life) this creates a great deal of wear and tear on everything around them. New parents end up having to choose between two opposites when it comes to what they surround themselves with — items that are cheap and disposable, or items that are expensive and durable.
When it comes to portable gaming, this creates a serious problem. A new parent could buy a gaming laptop, but it would be unlikely to survive being pulled off a table or desk onto the floor. And then, since gaming laptops aren’t cheap, one would be around $1,000 or more out of pocket for the replacement, which would also be unlikely to survive such treatment. This becomes very expensive very quickly. So, for any portable computing when a baby is in the picture, the laptop needs to be able to take a fall and keep going.
Happily, such laptops exist — a number of laptops pass a battery of tests known as MIL-STD-810. These are the tests used by the American Military to determine if a laptop is likely to survive use in the field. They are tested for impact absorption, sand and liquid penetration, and extreme heat and cold, among others. In the process, MIL-STD-810 tests for just about anything a small child could do to a laptop — if a laptop can survive MIL-STD-810, it can survive an infant or toddler.
Unfortunately, while most gaming laptops are built to handle the heat of a high power CPU and GPU, they aren’t built to handle MIL-STD testing. There are exceptions — ASUS has their TUF line of gaming laptops, most of which handle MIL-STD-810. In fact, they advertise it as the only gaming laptop line in the world to have that level of durability.
In a technical sense, ASUS’ claim about their TUF line is correct. They are the only company in the world right now who builds a line of MIL-STD-capable gaming laptops. However, most laptop manufacturers actually do offer products with the specs to handle high-end gaming and pass MIL-STD-810 testing — they just don’t sell them as gaming laptops.
Instead, they are high-end business laptops.
Most laptop manufacturers have them. For example, HP sells their EliteBook 1050, which offers similar hardware to their Omen series of gaming laptops. As another example, MSI has their Creator P series, a line of business laptops with near-identical hardware specs to their GS series. The main differences tend to be price, operating system, and battery life — the business laptops offer a longer battery life, come pre-loaded with Windows 10 Professional, and can cost as much as a thousand dollars more than their gaming laptop equivalent.
This can put a new or expecting parent in a bind when it comes to buying their hardware. If they don’t have a brand preference, they can buy an ASUS TUF gaming laptop and call it a day. But if they do have a brand preference that isn’t ASUS, they have to choose between spending less money to risk that their child will pull the laptop onto the floor when they aren’t looking, or paying hundreds and possibly thousands of dollars more for the peace of mind that their laptop will survive a close encounter with their baby .
In the end, the decision comes down to utility and brand preference. The extra money for a laptop that will pass MIL-STD-810 tends to be worth it — a new parent is likely to spend less money by paying extra for the durability than they would replacing broken laptops. And, once one sets horsepower aside, a high-end business laptop has a number of advantages, not the least of which are the better battery life and the ability to use it in a professional environment. Finding a laptop that will allow you to continue playing games while enjoying parenthood thus becomes finding the specs you like in a brand you like and making certain that the laptop will pass MIL-STD-810. It is expensive, but worth it.
Robert B. Marks is, among many other things, a habitual Minecraft player and the father of a wonderful 13 month-old baby girl.
