GAEMS is a company that strives to push the boundaries of portable gaming.
If you think that means GAEMS focuses on traditional portable consoles, such as your Android phone or a 3DS, you’d be wrong. What GAEMS does is produce high-quality cases and monitors that allow players to take their consoles on the road to set up and play elsewhere. And while GAEMS has released a number of products over the years, its latest is easily its most powerful and most impressive yet.
At E3 2019, I had the opportunity to check out the Guardian Pro XP. It marks GAEMS biggest project yet, as it combines a sturdy case with a massive 24-inch, 60Hz monitor and a built-in PC. It sounded like overkill to me, particularly since the gaming laptop market has grown dramatically in recent years, and I can’t envision most consumers wanting to purchase such a beast of a machine. But importantly, it’s not aiming for your everyday user who just wants to play games for a couple of hours a day, or who are keen to keep their gaming experience at home. If you’re that kind of player, the GAEMS Vanguard is more your style.
As GAEMS founder John Smith explained, the Guardian Pro XP is designed with content creators in mind. This is meant for streamers; the kind of people who need to take their set-up with them on the go in order to create new videos or streams. Smith describes the Guardian Pro XP as a “toolbox”, which has all the necessary parts and tools needed for content creators to get a stream running in about 10 minutes. There are three chips inside it, focusing on video, audio, and the proprietary media center respectively, to guarantee that everything moves as smoothly as possible. It has the capability for actual surround sound, though virtual sound is its default setting. And without any consoles stored inside of it, the unit weighs a sizable 18 and a half pounds.
In designing the Guardian Pro XP, GAEMS consulted with streamers throughout the design process in order to ensure that their concerns would be addressed. It’s why it’s designed to allow for easy camera installation, along with any other devices a streamer needs to do their job. While it can support 4K cameras and 4K graphics, it can run Doom at 1080p at 60 fps without too much difficulty from the look of things. And despite being absolutely packed with stuff, when closed the case has room to not only fit all of its internal components, but there is additional space left over for other cables and controllers to be stored inside it as well.
The base configuration and internal specs have not been addressed yet, but GAEMS is aiming to keep the price low so that up-and-coming content creators can have access to it. It’s currently retailing for $700 USD and is set to launch on August 2nd. It’s ambitious, but if GAEMS delivers on its promises, streamers will have a very powerful and useful toolbox to look forward to.
