- 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 chassis,
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.
- [Announcer] Nani?
- Sure, they used to make PCs.
I mean, who could forget such classics
as the ActionNote, Apex, or Geneva.
But Epson stopped building personal computers back in 1996
when their celebrity spokesman
was 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 cyan tank runs dry?
And with PC gaming on the rise in Japan, can it game?
Oh, and also who's our sponsor?
(narrator speaking in foreign language)
- Build Redux.
Build Redux builds fully customizable gaming PCs
suitable for any budget.
Pick your favorite games
and see how they perform with the online PC builder.
It's so easy!
Head to the link below and create your new rig today.
- Right outta the gate,
the included keyboard and mouse are nothing special.
In true Epson fashion, it includes laser printing.
Of course, they're referring to the laser printing
on the key caps, 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 9023 from LightOn.
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 ROG
given that they've been using this name so long.
So the specific model we're looking at
is just on this little non-descript 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 fricking tank.
That's not the only thing
that reminds me of 15 years ago though.
Check this out.
Five and a quarter inch base, not one, but two,
and it gets even better.
A three and a half inch bay? Are you kidding me?
It has a lock for the power switch.
This is how my parents kept me from gaming.
Or 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 three ports
on the front of it, and yet here we are.
Okay, 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?
- [Tanner] Oh yeah. - Of course we did, oh good.
- [Tanner] 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 disks
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 an office
that still keeps a lot of data on disk,
or even worse, diskette.
Older home users with disk-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 feet
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 ports.
No, not so much.
Okay, about as sophisticated as NCIX was
in terms of branding of individual machines.
Probably the most interesting thing back here is this.
Whoop, there she goes.
Not much to write home about
in terms of cable management there, Epson.
- [Tanner] That actually was our fault.
- [Linus] Oh, that's our fault.
- [Tanner] Yeah, yeah, it was cable managed just fine.
- [Linus] 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 watt non-modular unit from Delta
with a single 120 millimeter cooling fan.
The CPU is a Ryzen 5600X but can be configured
with up to a 5950X, very high end.
Case fan seems to use a bit of an unusual mount.
Comes to us courtesy of Minebea Mistumi.
Fun fact, Mitsumi, who later merged with Minebea
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
120 by 38 millimeter fan
like you would find in many older Dell Octiplex units
but with just the standard three pin power connector
instead of Dell's non-standard five 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 grill.
What I wanna take a closer look at here is our GPU
and, more importantly, our GPU support bracket.
These were commonplace in server chassis
back in the late nineties and early 2000s,
but have made their way out of fashion somehow
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,
manufacturers 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 spec gaming GPU
out 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 can be wrong.
This is a GT 1030,
which is five 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 A4500 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 1,000 watt power supply option.
A 650 watt unit should handle this card,
but I would strongly recommend the 1,000 watt unit
if you want to be safer in the long run.
- Yeah, what you're gonna do.
- Well this, how's this gonna fit in there though?
- Because we're gonna move these up and down.
- Oh, wish me luck. Good luck to myself.
Now that's weird.
Last time I checked, 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 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 gonna change the lettering
on the chipset heat sync,
which still says prime series on it?
Hey, posit drive motherboard screws.
How about that?
We had so many requests for posit drive bits
for the LTT screwdriver,
presumably from people in Japan, I guess.
Can confirm Phillips Head Works fine-ish.
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.
- [Tanner] No, that one's 4,000.
- [Linus] 4,000? - [Tanner] Yep.
- 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 chip set system with eight RAM 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 2007, 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, Pegatron would later end up buying ASRock,
which itself was also spun off from Asus,
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,
we emailed 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 3080 TI.
Cook at first too.
While we're in here,
I'm gonna upgrade it with some more memory.
We ordered the bare minimum eight gigs
because I also didn't feel like paying their mark up
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.
- You're gonna want these.
- No, I wanna use these, these came with my gaming pc.
- [Tanner] Yeah, you ever tried to use a Japanese keyboard
with with a US layout?
- [Linus] No, oh my god. The space bar is fragmented.
- [Tanner] Oh, the space bar? 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, can I even, yeah, well now 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.
- [Linus] I mean, it's not quality, that's for sure.
- [Andrew] You don't think you did that
when you bent it earlier?
- Mm, I mean it's possible,
but I shouldn't have been able to do that.
Oh, hold on, oh yeah, look at that.
We've bent it back.
Right, I realized we never talked about
the hot swap drive base in the front.
These are awesome.
Each of them is just wired up
individually to the motherboard
so you don't need a complicated back plane
or 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?
Is this their OS, like did they load this on?
- [Tanner] Yes.
- Okay, did they removed my bloody start menu or like?
- [Tanner] 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 gamer-y 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 gonna manage to remove the heat from this GPU.
There's an intake right next to the GPU's cooling fans that,
hmm, I think might help.
Wait, that's the boot hard drive?
- [Tanner] 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 tilde?
- [Tanner] You might also have some keys not line up
with what they say on the keyboard
if you haven't changed the keyboard over to Japanese layout.
- No, no, I got this, I got this.
I don't know, it just says standard keyboard.
Okay, good luck.
- [Tanner] Bottom right corner beside the clock.
- No, no, I'm good, I got this.
You only have F1.
- [Tanner] No, wait, hold on, hold on!
This is the part we're missing.
Gimme one second.
- Oh, we're missing something.
- [Tanner] Yeah, we always put our Steam games on a drive,
and there's a...
- 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 didn't even know what the objective is right now.
Oh, this is just team deathmatch.
Oh my God, it's 15 to nothing right now.
This is not quiet.
- [Tanner] It's that big back fan.
- [Linus] That chunky fan in the back
is definitely contributing.
71 degrees on the GPU though, 63 degrees 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 two 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 Ryzen 7000.
We're gonna 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 four years by some accounts.
Also, our machine handled a high-end GPU like a champ.
Even with that 650 watt power supply,
our 3080 made it through a stress test
in our environmental chamber
at 20 degrees Celsius room temperature
with 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 $2,675.
Also not great,
but PC parts have typically been more expensive in Japan,
and Epson does offer onsite repair for very cheap,
like really cheap, as low as $34 a year for up to six years.
You have to be within Japan's five most populated islands,
but that covers 99% of the population,
just like 99% of our videos end in a segue to our sponsor.
- Squarespace!
It's 2023, and your brand or business
needs an online presence.
I don't make the rules.
Building your own website may seem daunting,
but Squarespace is there to make it easier
than figuring out how the self checkout line works
at your local grocery store, so very easy.
Squarespace is the easy to use platform to start selling
or promoting anything and everything on the ol' interwebs.
Local business, portfolio, blog?
Squarespace has ready to use and easy to customize themes
and templates for anything.
They even look great on mobile devices.
Heck, we use Squarespace here at LMG.
If you already have a website,
Squarespace makes it super simple to port your domain over
and start using their customization
and marketing tools to really stand out.
Plus, they offer 24/7 support.
I wish I could say the same about the self checkout line.
Get started on your webpage today
and head over to squarespace.com/LTT
for 10% off your first purchase.
- If you enjoyed this video,
maybe check out the time I demoed
a more typical Epson product, a theater room projector.
That thing is so awesome.