Japan is an Island by the Sea filled with volcanoes and it's beautiful
beautiful like this Japanese workstation PC with its bone White Steel Chassy hot
swap hard drive drawer and built-in GPU stabilizer such elegance and Grace could
only come from a well-known gaming system manufacturer like Epson n sure
they used to make PCS I mean who could forget such Classics as the action note
Apex or Geneva but Epson stopped building personal computers back in 1996
when their celebrity spokesman is still getting confused for Sinbad so how is it
that in 2023 I am standing next to this
brand new Epson desktop it seems that
while Epson does make all the things that we know them for here in the West
in their home country they are all over the road there's not only Epson laptops
and desktops but also Epson watches accounting software and even anime all
of that stuff is there and this is here
and this raises a lot of questions like is it any good does it refuse to work
when the Cen tank runs dry and with PC gaming on the Ryzen Japan can it game
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below and create your new rig today right out of the gate the included
keyboard Mouse are nothing special in true Epson
fashion it includes laser printing of course they're referring to the laser
printing on the keycaps which includes not only Roman characters but also what
I assume are Japanese ones I don't know I don't read Japanese what I do read is
this fantastic label on the mouse which is the worst thing I've ever seen this
is the SM 923 from light on that's the
whole review which is fine because the main
star of the show is the Epson endeavor Pro which is kind of like saying Acer
Aspire or ASUS R OG given that they've been using this name so long so the
specific model we're looking at is just on this little nondescript sticker right
here the first thing that stands out to me about which is the rigidity of the
chassis I don't think I've seen anything like this in the last 15 years sure it's
not made of the you know latest trendy materials like aluminum but dang it this
thing is built like a freaking tank that's not the only thing that reminds
me of 15 years ago though check this out 5 and 1/4 in Bays not one but two and it
gets even better a 3 and 1/2 in Bay are
you kidding me it has a lock for the power switch this is how my parents kept
me from gaming well it's how they thought they kept me from gaming I actually had a key for it everything
about this design is so retro I wouldn't even expect to find USB 3 ports on the
front of it and yet here we are how many
no shut up it has an actual optical
drive in it can't believe I paid real money for an optical drive in 2023 did
we buy this oh yeah of course we did oh good and we imported it but in Japan
that might not seem that outlandish and there are a couple of reasons for this
Japan made headlines recently for their efforts to finally phase out floppy
discs in an effort to reduce bureaucratic waste so as a machine that
can be used for business or a workstation for game development for
example this could easily find its way into to an office that still keeps a lot
of data on disk or even worse disette
older home users with dis based backups would also find it useful for the same
reason and even for those without backups Optical drives may still have
some Allure as video rental stores are not uncommon there Geo a chain of video
rental stores had nearly a thousand locations at the end of 2022 when you
consider that one in five apartments in Tokyo are less than 200 square ft and
the average house is less than half the size of its American counterpart it's
not unreasonable to conclude that there are a lot of people who could have an
entertainment center or a desktop PC but
not both so with an optical drive in your PC even if you don't have an
entertainment center you can still watch the latest Blockbuster videos you picked
up on a two-day rental from the local Geo half expecting to find PS2 p no not
so much okay about as sophisticated as
NC was in terms of branding of individual machines probably the the
most interesting thing back here is this
who There She Goes uh not much to write
home about in terms of cable management there Epson that actually was our fault
oh that's our fault yeah yeah it was cable managed just fine oh did they wrap
the CPU fan around this eight pin connector because in shipping if this
gets jostled around it can pull out that connector so that's a bad idea the power
supply is a 650 W non-modular unit from
Delta with a single 120 mm cooling fan
the CPU is a ryzen 5600x but can be
configured with up to a 5950 X very
highend case fan seems to use a bit of an unusual mount comes to us courtesy of
mania mitsumi fun fact mitsumi who later
merged with Mania to create its current form was the company that made the
controllers for the NES the SNES and
several others this fan appears to be a very similar 120x 38 mm fan like you
would find in many older Dell Opti units but with just the standard three pin
power connector instead of Dell's non-standard 5 Pin these thicker fans
are great for applications where High static pressure is necessary like
against radiators or restrictive fan grills not that this is a particularly
restrictive drill what I want to take a closer look at here is our GPU and more
importantly our GPU support bracket these were common place in Server
Chassis back in the late '90s and early 2000s but have made their way out of
fashion some in spite of the fact that gpus have gotten heavier and heavier as
the years have gone by you'll still find these in tier one systems or Puget
systems for example manufactures their own out of laser cut acrylic but this is
really robust I would actually be confident putting a modern heavy GPU in
this thing knowing that it is not going to come loose in shipping this is great
I guess we'll find out how well it works when we upgrade our GPU after because as
you guys can see I didn't exactly go with a top speec gaming GPU of the Box
don't touch I love that a the times it matters when it's spinning you won't be
able to read it anyway and even if you could I suspect many people in Japan
wouldn't read English like it should probably be in Japanese right I could be
wrong this is a gt130 which is 5 years old and not a good GPU as we discussed
in our surprisingly recent review of it but it's not the only GPU that the
Endeavor Pro can be equipped with in fact it can be ordered with up to a 3080
TI or an A45 00 workstation card for
professional workloads but rather than pay a huge markup we figured we would
just swap in a more powerful GPU on this side of the Pacific fun fact by the way
epson's configurator is pretty rudimentary if you select a 3080 TI it
won't automatically upgrade you to the th000 watt power supply option a 650 W
unit should handle this card but I would strongly recommend the th000 watt unit
if you want to be safer in the long run yeah what you're going to do well this how's this going to fit in there though
because we're going to move these up and down oh wish me luck huh good luck to
myself now that's weird last time I check Epson also doesn't make
motherboards how suspicious my first thought was they just put a sticker on
there but that's not actually what happened it appears to have been silk
screened on at the same Factory that did all the other printing on the
motherboard I mean this is clearly an ASUS Prime b550 plus motherboard but
it's been rebranded for Epson curiously
the model number number has also been changed are they trying to make it
harder to track down the original part number for some reason but then if
they're doing that why go to the extra steps of rebranding it if they aren't
also going to change the lettering on the chipset heat sink which still says
Prime series on it hey PA a drive motherboard screws how about that we had
so many requests for PA a drive bits for the LT screwdriver presumably from
people in Japan I guess can confirm Philips head works fine is maybe the
answer lies with the Intel version of this Tower available in a stylish blue
rather than red so you can show off your preferred processor brand is the
motherboard from that an ASUS Rebrand as well unfortunately we don't have that
one on hand I didn't feel like paying another $2,000 plus shipping to get one
oh that one's 4,000 4,000 y anyway what
we did manage to do is track down a review of it that includes a plethora of
pictures at pc. watch. impress. co.jp
it's an x299 chipset system with eight r
R slots a PCI connector and two PS2
ports on the io it's also screen printed blue something that Gigabyte might do
but there's no x299 motherboard on the market that we can find that matches the
shape IO and the inclusion of a legacy
PCI slot to say nothing of the color so what the heck is going on here well if
you've been building PCS for a while the model numbers on these motherboards
might seem familiar not the numbers themselves but the font in the 2000s
nearly every ASUS motherboard featured this font slowly over the course of the
late 2000s and early 2010s it was phased out of ASUS's retail boards this could
be attributed to a corporate restructuring that ASUS went through
sometime in 20172 2008 the organization
split with ASUS's branded offerings remaining with ASUS while their
divisions for OEM parts and case fabrication were spun off to a separate
company called pegatron ironically
Megatron would later end up buying ASRock which itself was also spun off
from isus but back in 2002 very inbred
these Dell motherboards and these HP motherboards feature the pegatron font
and are as far as we can tell made by pegatron it's probably not a stretch
then to assume that this case and any other parts not branded Epson are also
pegatron if you're wondering whether ASUS is aware that pegatron is
rebranding their retail motherboard designs uh we email mailed them to ask
about how the devil all of that works and at the time of filming we were still
awaiting a response though awaiting is a word that I'm using pretty Loosely here
because I'm not expecting them to comment on it every time I've asked them
about the history with ASRock for example they've just kind of gone let me
get back to you and then never gotten
back to me it's pretty safe to assume that they do know about all of this
though given that they have drivers on their website for this model number
albeit with very little additional information ooh look at that she's level
boys oh I like it laugh at the Antiquated approach all you want but
that GPU is not flipping going anywhere and I don't even have the PCI screws in
yet look at this I love it this is not a
cheap chassis in spite of the fact that it kind of looks like crap and it's not
painted black and doesn't have any RGB this is
like solid never deviate from your principles here Epson this is awesome so
level I could eat my dinner on the back of this 38 TI cook it first too while
we're in here I'm going to upgrade it with some more memory we ordered the bare minimum 8 gigs because I also
didn't feel like paying their markup for system memory so let's go ahead and
throw some more RAM in hey not bad huh it's not particular hey no I don't want
that want these I no I want to use these the I these came with my gaming PC yeah
you ever you ever tried to use a Japanese uh keyboard with uh with a US
layout no oh my God the space bar is
fragmented oh the space no the space bar is Tiny the rest of those are are keys
for other things no I know no I know I just mean it's in three pieces okay I
have a short shift which I can tolerate I hate this enter that space bar though
wow uh can I even yeah that's kind of yeah that's kind of where I would hit it
most of the time no I should be okay okay okay just make sure that you change
the keyboard layout I mean it's not quality that's for sure you don't think
you did that when you bent it earlier I mean it's possible but I shouldn't have
been able to do that oh hold on oh yeah
look at that we bent it back right I realized we never talked about the hot
swap Drive bays in the front these are awesome uh each of them is just wired up
individually to the motherboard so you don't need a complicated back plane or
uh Port multiplier or anything like that you just load a drive onto one of these
pop it in I wouldn't say that these were popular in the mid 2000s over here but
they were certainly more broadly available and it was mostly due to cost
that case manufacturers didn't Implement them where's my start menu at hello
buddy uh is this their OS like did they
they load this on yes okay did they
remove my bloody start menu or like no that's supposed to have a start menu it
had a start menu when I left the other building okay cool yeah let's just give
it the old the old one two here for a
stupid gamery case it's not that bad it's kind of you know classy and I have
some hope that that thick 120 mil fan is going to manage to remove the heat from
this GPU there's an intake right next to the GPU's cooling fans that I think
might help wait that's the boot hard drive yeah yeah we were trying to save
costs this doesn't have a bloody SSD why is Arlo here oh my God you guys are
doing the wag hoodie photo shoot hey there we go it booted up just fine this
time also I am not having any trouble with this keyboard I will have you know
yet where's my ti you might also have some keys not line up with what they say
on the keyboard if you haven't change the keyboard over to Japanese layout no
no I got this i got this uh I don't know it just says standard keyboard okay good
luck bottom right corner beside the uh clock no no I'm good I got this you only
have F1 wait hold on hold on this is the part we're missing oh give me one second
oh we're missing something yeah we we always put our Steam games on drive
drive and there's a no type no front type c that didn't even occur to me yeah
that's not the most modern thing oh balls to be clear this is a fairly small
problem but a problem nonetheless it is
2023 and I just bought a computer with a mechanical boot Drive what it's better
than the craptastic ones that we got with the sports team branded mice like I
mean I managed to do that I don't even know what the objective is right now oh
this is just team death oh my God it's 15 to nothing right now this is not
quiet it's that big back fan that chunky
fan in the back is definitely contributing 71° on the GPU though 63°
on the CPU while it's not the quietest system I've ever encountered it's not
ridiculously loud either and the temps are well under control wow you could
warm your hands on this maybe toast some marshmallows I mean with all the exhaust
focused in one place and that's without even the highest end CPU that we could
configure not that you can configure anything at the moment as of filming
this unit was actually discontinued 2 days ago but that doesn't mean that
Epson is done updating their desktop offerings it looks like they might be
gearing up to revamp their AMD machines probably with ryzon 7000 we're going to
have a link down below but please note they only ship domestically how much do
they ship domestically well at least enough to justify a custom motherboard I
guess and PC gaming in Japan has been going through a bit of a boom recently
doubling in size in Just 4 years by some accounts also our machine handled a
high-end GPU like a champ even with that 650 W power supply our 3080 made it
through a stress test in our environmental chamber at 20° C room
temperature with no no notable thermal issues now that doesn't mean I'm
necessarily recommending that you buy one of these the AMD version like this
one starts at$ 226,000 Yen or roughly
$1,675 with specs that are not great as
for the Intel one it starts at 360,000
Yen or roughly $26.75 also not great but PC parts have
typically been more expensive in Japan and Epson does offer on-site repair for
very cheap like like really cheap as low as $34 a year for up to 6 years you have
to be within Japan's five most populated Islands but that covers 99% of the
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enjoyed this video maybe check out the time I demoed a more typical Epson
product a theater room projector that thing is so awesome