Konami has been making games for decades, but now it’s making gaming PCs. Konami Amusement, a subsidiary of Konami Holdings, is now accepting orders for its new line of Arespear gaming PCs. The company expects to begin shipments for the Japanese market in September, and they are decidedly not cheap.
The Arespear computers come in three different versions, all of which have the same custom “wiffleball” cases, measuring a compact 575.3 x 501.5 x 230mm. They also have a dedicated Asus Xonar XE sound card. The C300 is the base model, while the C700 and C700+ offer better specs. The C700+ is also the only one of the three with a transparent side panel.
The C300 will have respectable internals with an Intel Core i5-9400F CPU (air-cooled), 8GB of DDR4 memory, a 512GB M.2 SSD, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650. With that GPU, you’re limited to a single DisplayPort 1.4, one HDMI 2.0b, and a DVI-D port. You’re probably thinking that sounds alright for a modest gaming PC, but the price is anything but modest. The C300 will cost 184,800 yen, which works out to $1,760.
The C300 without a window or RGB but still priced at nearly $2,000.
If you step up to the C700 Arespear, you get a water-cooled i7-9700 CPU, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, a 512 M.2 SSD, a 1TB hard drive, and an Nvidia RTX 2070 Super. You’ve got many more display options with these computers in the form of three DisplayPort 1.4 ports and an HDMI 2.0b on the video card. There is also an additional DisplayPort and HDMI on the motherboard. The C700 costs 316,800 yen ($3,016), and the C700+ is 338,800 yen ($3,226).
The only difference between the two 700-series is the window and RGB lighting on the C700+. That distinction really drives home the wild pricing. Are people going to pay $200 more just for some RGB? Probably, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. We don’t know when or if Konami Amusement, which also makes arcade games, will launch the computers in other markets.
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