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Power United States

Power Regulations Cut Off Select Dell PCs from Certain US States (windowscentral.com) 151

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Dell is no longer shipping certain PCs to a handful of U.S. states that have tightened their rules and regulations around computer power consumption. From a report: The headline and "what you need to know" box already summarize this, meaning you're 99% caught up on the current situation, but there are a few specific details to go over in the event you live in Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, California, or Colorado. As reported by The Register, Dell is no longer shipping the Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 Gaming Desktop to select states in the U.S. If you attempt to place an order and ship the machines to any of the blacklisted zones, your order will be canceled. In a statement to The Register, Dell clarified the situation. "[...] This was driven by the California Energy Commission (CEC) Tier 2 implementation that defined a mandatory energy efficiency standard for PCs -- including desktops, AIOs and mobile gaming systems. This was put into effect on July 1, 2021. Select configurations of the Alienware Aurora R10 and R12 were the only impacted systems across Dell and Alienware."
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Power Regulations Cut Off Select Dell PCs from Certain US States More

Power Regulations Cut Off Select Dell PCs from Certain US States

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  • And the reason why... (Score:3)

    by Gabest ( 852807 ) on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @12:47PM (#61626033)

    was crowdsourced to the kind readers.

  • class them as workstations (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @12:49PM (#61626039)

    class them as workstations

    • Or just have a friend in another state order it, then have him ship it to you.

    • Or ship it without a keyboard+mouse and call it a games console

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      When Touring-Complete programmable calculators came out in the late 60's and early 70's, manufacturers were hesitant to call them "computers" and sometimes even "programmable" in ads and brochures; otherwise they'd be subject to export restrictions meant to keep military-related tech from certain countries.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by hawk ( 1151 )

        the can't be right: something that doesn't travel to other countries can hardly be "touring complete" . . . :)

        hawk

    • class them as workstations

      The class is dependent on the components. For that to work they would need to actually sell you better components rather than bottom shelf shit spray painted in a cool looking colour (this is Dell we're talking about).

      It's not hard to meet the requirements. We should be thankful that there's one less piece of Dell garbage being sold.

    • space heater would be a more apt category.

  • Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @12:49PM (#61626041)
    The focus should be on restricting emissions. Not necessarily consumption of power. What if I have solar panels? I think it's a mistake to pair sustainability with austerity in everybody's mind, when technology is the key to having our cake and pretty much eating it, too.
    • Why set gas mileage targets when we can just set carbon emission targets?

      • > Why set gas mileage targets when we can just set carbon emission targets?

        That would work quite a bit better. We'd have significantly lower emissions if the rules were based on average emissions (gallons) per mile, rather than mileage per gallon as the US does it. Here's why.

        Consider the manufacturer sells two cars.
        Suppose the corporate average mpg requirement is 25 mpg.

        We have two cars, each driven 100 miles by their owners.
        One car gets 49 mpg, so the other can get 1 mpg and the average is 25 mpg.

        To g

    • What if I have solar panels?

      Then you should still focus on not wasting electricity for no reason, backfeed the grid, get paid for your efforts, and with your help we can take yet another fossil fuel plant offline.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I don't think I will.

        I make more using my excess generation to mine cryptocurrencies than I would if I sold it back to the grid.

        If the power companies paid me dollar-for-dollar what I backfeed then I might stop cryptomining with my excess power. This pennies-on-the-dollar energy credits bullshit they currently do where they might pay me at the end of the year if my overage is enough is not really worthy.

        Let me run my own little green energy company off my residential property and I'll cover every square fo

      • Re:Too bad (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @02:01PM (#61626359)

        There's no "we" you nutsack. Whatever I decide is reason enough, you don't decide. I intend to eventually go all-solar off grid, and I'm going to use the electricity for whatever I damn well please and that may include a PC that I leave on all day. When environmentalists start to argue that even going 100% carbon emission free isn't good enough, people will start to see you for what you really are: scolds and harridans.

    • At that point you don't buy a substandard Alienware laptop anyway.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by genixia ( 220387 )

      Every watt used adds to global warming. Let's make sure as many of them used are useful and not wasted.

      Solar panels are great, but owning them hasn't stopped me searching for ways to reduce my electricity usage. We need to do both. Every watt that I don't use ends up on the grid for someone else to use, and reduces the need for it to be generated by a nuclear/oil/gas generation plant. That will remain true until every watt used is generated sustainably, which unfortunately is unlikely for a long time yet

  • If you live in California (I pity you!), there's always Microcenter.

    Besides, who buys gaming PCs from Dell? If you want a good gaming PC there's no other choice... build it yourself!

    • If you live in California (I pity you!), there's always Microcenter.

      The only Microcenter in the SF Bay area closed nine years ago. The closest Microcenter is a 6+ hour drive away.

      With Fry's gone too, just about the only in person computer parts stores that remain are Central Computers and Best Buy. Central Computers is pretty good, if a little pricey,and Best Buy is more competitive than it used to be, but neither is as good as Microcenter.

      Besides, who buys gaming PCs from Dell? If you want a good gaming PC there's no other choice... build it yourself!

      The severe parts shortages seem to finally be clearing up, but in the past year the issue has been GPU availability. Usually for anythin

    • Gaming laptops are hard to build yourself, though.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by trparky ( 846769 )
        The words "gaming" and "laptop" are two words that should never be used in the same sentence.

  • Well-intentioned but idiotic and unworkable (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Echoez ( 562950 ) * on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @01:10PM (#61626119)

    There are so many problems with laws such as these (in terms of actually achieving the desired outcome of lower power consumption) that it boggles the mind.

    What if you buy the PC components separately?
    What if you buy a cheaper PC and upgrade your GPU?
    What if you buy your PC in Arizona and drive across the border?
    What if you live off the grid with your own solar panels?
    What if you're buying this to research protein folding at Stanford or something?

    If they want to reduce power consumption, then increase the price of power. This law will achieve nothing.

    • A less powerful machine may also take more time to get the same job done. A machine that takes twice as long to, say, encode a video is likely to use more power than a fast machine would for the same job (especially if the monitor and hard drive are powered up for the duration) Same may go for for limits on vacuum cleaner wattage in the EU.

      • This has to do with IDLE power usage not total usage. It is also about using an 80Plus gold power supply or better. It also means turning on sleep mode by default (which the user can turn off). None of the stuff here is onerous in any way at all.

        • Your benevolent overlords let you disable sleep mode?

          Don't get too used to that, that will have to change soon. For your own good of course.

    • servers and workstations are not desktops

    • This law will achieve nothing.

      Just because the restrictions aren't particularly useful for some discrete edge cases you can think up, doesn't mean that the restrictions won't have some intended effect for the majority of sales in the state. The law appears to primarily be aimed at businesses, and will likely only be assessed on larger-scale imports.

    • What if you buy the PC components separately?

      Not sure about your PC but in mine individual components meet the requirements.

      What if you buy a cheaper PC and upgrade your GPU?

      That's allowed. Why wouldn't it be. Read the rules.

      What if you buy your PC in Arizona and drive across the border?

      Not a problem. Just don't sell your computer.

      What if you live off the grid with your own solar panels?

      If you live off the grid do what you want, open the windows with the AC on for all anyone cares, you'll just need to drive out of state to buy your PC. Mind you if you are still on the grid I recommend getting a compliant computer. It saves power maximising the energy you sell back to the grid and helps get us one step closer to shutti

    • What if you can't find an 80Plus or better power supply?!?!?! Those are so incredibly hard to find!

      Oh wait, it actually takes effort to find one that isn't 80Plus or better. Which would comply with the relevant law.

      IOW, the vast majority of your questions aren't actually a big deal. This is Dell using shitty power supplies in their high-end models. Better PSUs aren't hard to find, and aren't going to be a large difference in unit cost for these high-end models.

      The reason why power costs alone aren't goi

  • Reminds me of toilet flush rules (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Esben ( 553245 ) on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @01:11PM (#61626125)
    I can remember from my stays in the US that the toilets didn't flush very well. I later learned there were rules maximum size of the water tank. In Denmark water is taxed: Therefore there is a market for toilets saving water, having two flush options, large and small flush.

    Politicians shall never decide the solution, but make incentives to solve the problem. I.e. tax water and CO2. Then the market will figure out solutions.

    • Water costs money in America, too. Much like recycling, if you rely solely on people conserving, you're not going to be as efficient as you can be if you address it through forcibly limiting consumption. Many people will gladly pay higher rates to use the same amount of water, just look at all the green lawns in areas with high water costs and droughts.

    • I can remember from my stays in the US that the toilets didn't flush very well. I later learned there were rules maximum size of the water tank.

      Actually the problem is that no one puts any effort into designing to meet regulations. It's a classic case of "rules say X so we'll just make X" rather than thinking if reducing the tank size means we should spend 5 minutes changing the bowl dimensions as well.

      This case here is no different. It's not hard to meet the efficacy requirements. What Dell is no longer allowed to sell is literally it's single most garbage tier piece of shit inefficient custom components.

      I joked years ago that the shit Dell passes

      • snip

        I joked years ago that the shit Dell passes off as a "computer" should be illegal, and I'm pleasantly surprised that California is here to help.

        GamersNexus has been doing reviews of pre-built gaming machines lately, and the Dell one was referred to as "a warranty with E-waste attached". Partly because they were billed for a warranty they explicitly declined, and partly because the computer sucked so much. A separate review of an Alienware model is labeled "Hilariously Bad Alienware R10 Ryzen PC: $1800 Pre-Built Review" (here [youtube.com]).

        • Yep, seen them both, fully agree. Remember how in both reviews they commented on the ugliest part looked like the powersupply, but that they were actually alright? Yeah well that power supply actually meets the CEC Tier 2 requirements as well (80+ Gold).

          Just how crappy do your components need to be to actually fail.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      I can remember from my stays in the US that the toilets didn't flush very well. I later learned there were rules maximum size of the water tank. In Denmark water is taxed: Therefore there is a market for toilets saving water, having two flush options, large and small flush.

      Politicians shall never decide the solution, but make incentives to solve the problem. I.e. tax water and CO2. Then the market will figure out solutions.

      Well, basically the standard American toilet at the time was using 13 gallons to flus

    • Great comment.

      Two flush options are generally available on toilets in the US, but it amounts to "very little" or "little" water. Just hold down the handle longer for the larger "little" option.

      I would very much appreciate the approach you mentioned, but then we wouldn't have a comical episode of a show called King of the Hill where the character goes in search of underground illegal high-flow toilet sellers...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The UK has low flow toilets too, and they turned out to be an environmental disaster. They leak more water than they save.

      It seems to be a market failure. Japanese toilets use less water and flush better because they accelerate the water and swirl it around. But they cost a bit more so people in the UK won't buy them.

  • I really wish we could go back to the days when game developers cared about gameplay and fun, not just pretty graphics. I have probably over 600 hours in Stardew Valley, which is SNES level graphics at best, but it's fun and was originally created by a single developer on probably a shoestring budget. Unlike plenty of more recent games where aside from looking much prettier, they don't really offer anything new in terms of gameplay over something like Stardew Valley.

    I, for one, am tired of nothing but remas

    • It's easier to create fun if you have a lot of brute-force power to make use of, and aren't spending all your time on optimisation as the game developers of the past had to.

      The real waste is ever-increasing screen resolutions (while sub-par framerates are still common...). High-DPI is nice for text, but there was just no need for the rush to 4K gaming (8 million pixels vs the 2 million pixels of 1080p!)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by hawk ( 1151 )

        128 bytes of RAM and 4k of ROM was good enough for my grandson's grandfather, and it's good enough for me!

        oh, wait . . .

    • What has your rant got to do with anything? This law doesn't ban high end gaming PCs or pretty graphics. In fact quite the opposite, it would appear that throwing a high end GPU into a PC would now provide it an additional power budget that could make another completely garbage piece of shit actually pass.

    • As for high power using laptops, my solution is to attach them to a treadmill. If you need the best graphics then you need to literally run faster. Think of it as an additional realism mode as you become tired and need extra hydration as you parkour across the game world.

  • they are idiots if DELL's marketing dept. doesn't run with this.

  • I noticed that some of these states also ban shipments of UPS units with sealed lead-acid batteries. If you want a UPS in vermont, it has to be equipped with the more expensive Lithium Ion batteries.

    Idiots.

  • next mac pro to suck and have way less max ram

  • Looking at the criteria, it looks like computers must have efficient components for their class, but not necessarily components that will make your system more energy efficient.
    For example a system with a particularly efficient mechanical hard drive may pass while the same system with a SSD may not, even though the SSD uses less power overall. That's because SSDs are expected to use less power and therefore, systems with SSDs have a smaller power budget.
    Also these are "desktop computers", not workstations o

    • The criteria is complicated but not hard to meet for components. Also it only applies to large companies which can manage complex requirements, and you can bet that this is something an intern could whip up on a spreadsheet.

      The focus here is on the bulk suppliers who fill office spaces in corporate America with thousands of computer with horrible garbage tier components.

  • Those standards were not easy to find (Score:3)

    by doug141 ( 863552 ) on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @01:27PM (#61626201)

    Dead link at the California website, there ought to be a law about that... found this though: https://energycodeace.com/down... [energycodeace.com]

    One requirement seems to be a 90% efficient power supply. Gamers Nexus reviewed the Alienware R10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    The power supply is at 11:46 in the video, is an 80+ gold, which is 87% efficient.

    There were more regulations about annual power usage, which were very hard to understand.

    • Re:Those standards were not easy to find (Score:5, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @02:07PM (#61626371)

      No there's no requirement for being 90% efficient. There's a requirement about having a 0.9 powerfactor which is a very different thing. The efficiency requirements from the law (from you own link, just follow the link on the front page of the PDF) actually align with an 80+ gold PSU, and frankly these days most PSUs on the market are 80+ gold anyway. Since that standard originally came out they had to revise it multiple times and add several more tiers as the industry collectively actually got good at designing PSUs.

      The law is hard to understand but it focuses almost exclusively on power efficiency and would be met by anyone not assembling a computer from garbage tier components (so I understand why Dell is having problems). Also the law only applies to big volume sellers. Small volume and component sellers only need to meet the default configuration requirements e.g. ship the computer so that windows goes to sleep after 30min of inactivity (which a default install of Windows 10 does anyway).

      They are trying to stop office buildings sitting full of computers inefficiently idling away burning power for no reason.

  • So person A can't have their 1000W (running around 550W at load) PSU computer, even if they only play on it on weekends, but a quicki-mart can cheerfully run a 1500W microwave 24/7 to warm burritos? Or person C a 1000W hairdryer for an entire 8 hour work shift?

    Don't these people PAY for power?
    Isn't power priced per unit consumed?
    Wouldn't a fairer allocation of the actual environmental costs be to simply ..raise the price per unit power ?

    At a certain point people have to tell their government to fuck off mi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by qubezz ( 520511 )
      Don't be dumb, you're comparing devices that are off when they are "off". A 1000W power supply that can't meet the 80plus certification means that that thing is wasting over 200 watts just sitting there. The Windows power profiles that will suspend a computer after inactivity also cut performance overall. Windows 10 of course reinstalls itself multiple times out of the box to "update", potentially reverting or even losing all settings except "balanced". https://thegeekpage.com/missin... [thegeekpage.com]

    • This has to do with IDLE power usage and efficiency of components. You just need to use more power efficiency PSU and have the system configured by default to idle and sleep when not under load. Under load the system can use as much power as it needs. The problem is lots of computers are on all the time and they suck down a lot of power which is a real problem because they use a lot of power but provide no value. This is designed to address that issue.

    • So person A can't have their 1000W (running around 550W at load) PSU computer,

      No they can. It just needs to have an 80Plus or better power supply. It takes some effort to find a power supply that isn't 80Plus or better.

      This story is about Dell using shitty components in a "top of the line" computer.

      Wouldn't a fairer allocation of the actual environmental costs be to simply ..raise the price per unit power

      The marginal cost for an individual running an 80Plus PSU or a piece-of-shit PSU isn't all that large. Thus power cost alone can't provide sufficient incentive unless you reach punitive levels of pricing. Especially since this is a high-end model of computer from a manufacturer who mak

  • I ask, because I'll bet you anything the family members of the legislators will have no problem acquiring the gaming PCs their children want and running them fulltime, etc.

    I know some have posted about "how great CA is" for telling people what (certain folks) can and cannot buy. Doesn't sound great to me.

    • Just one crappy Alienware laptop that you can't get. It's not really marketed towards the high end market anyway, and if your kids are whining that they need a gaming laptop you can get a better one that's cheaper anyway.

    • The requirement that Dell is failing to meet is they need an 80Plus or better power supply in this computer. This isn't a difficult requirement to meet. Dell is just making a piece of shit and pricing it as top-of-the-line.

      Those friends and family are probably getting better computers, but that's because these models from Dell are crap.

  • Gamer's Nexus reviewed [youtu.be] it and considered it junk. They might think it is a good thing some people cannot buy it. Basically it was overpriced and poorly especially when it came to basic cooling. They think these machines is e-waste very soon.

  • Luckily, no retailers in California are selling KW power supplies or the lates dozen-plus gore CPUs, so Californians can't build their own power-wasting computers, right?

  • Won't slower computers just take longer to render out content?

    Does it make a difference in energy consumption if I'm using 1000W for one hour, or 500W for two?

    • Individually? No. At scale? Maybe. That's what demand side management is about. It's often better to spread demand out to avoid high peaks that require either extra capacity be built for only occasional use, brown-outs, or spinning up inefficient/more-polluting sources to satisfy the peaks.

  • Just have a friend or relative living just across the border in a free state buy it for you, then go pick it up.

  • ...a 50A 240V oven (and air conditioner to keep the kitchen cool). That's over 20 times the power as the PC they're complaining about.

    I can get as many electric clothes dryers and refrigerators as I want too. There's probably no restriction on grow lights either.

    OK, granted, I'm not going to run the ovens more than an hour a day and I could play video games for 12. But point being, a lot of us use a lot more electricity in other home appliances than their gaming rigs.

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