News Dell Cannot Ship Alienware PCs to Certain U.S. States Due to Power Regulations

[Admin]

Some gaming PCs can no longer be shipped to California, other states.

Dell Cannot Ship Alienware PCs to Certain U.S. States Due to Power Regulations : Read more

 

[Deleted member 431422]

Considering recent heat waves and use of A/C I don't blame them. It's a matter of time when other products are affected. When car industry goes electric and all.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Why not give subsidies to homeowners/businesses to install solar panels on roofs and windows, maybe even develop siding for houses that is solar panels. If they wouldn't change anything like that, but would give incentives to people and make it affordable to do that, that would likely reduce strain on the grid because if you got a lot of energy from solar at your home, you wouldn't have to pull as much from the grid I wouldn't think.

 

[hallby81]

Why not give subsidies to homeowners/businesses to install solar panels on roofs and windows, maybe even develop siding for houses that is solar panels. If they wouldn't change anything like that, but would give incentives to people and make it affordable to do that, that would likely reduce strain on the grid because if you got a lot of energy from solar at your home, you wouldn't have to pull as much from the grid I wouldn't think.

That would make too much sense, especially for those states. But your definitely right, subsidies for solar w/ storage battery would help a lot. It would help a lot in any state except maybe Alaska. But instead of doing whats right, they would rather punish everyone with ineffective power consumption rules by mandating what electronic devices and appliances they can have in there houses.

 

[ThatMouse]

This is kind of ridiculous trying to make it illegal to play video games or do video rendering, but it doesn't actually prevent that.

 

[RareAir23]

Well, with what's going on with Alienware this is the genesis point of the story in question. Question is where does it truly end? Alienware announced this what? Yesterday? hp (who makes the Omen gaming PC line) was doing massive changes to their online store last night shutting it down for maintenance. Today Alienware. Tomorrow potentially hp. Next day Falcon Northwest, Origin PC, Digital Storm and Maingear (as examples). Being that California and 5 other states are doing this <REMOVED> don't be surprised if they do not stop with boutique builders. They could (keyword and emphasis being: could) continue by confiscating DIY gaming PC's door to door that violate policy and/or banning certain CPU's, GPU's, PSU's from being shipped/sold to the state. People think California wouldn't do that but this...is California we're talking about and with Gov. Newsom calling the shots don't be surprised if he at least tries all of what I just said and attempt to make it into law in the name of "saving the world from climate change" because Newsom is as dead serious about that as any leader in the world. Out!

MOD EDIT: Keep the politics out of it.

 

[sizzling]

Interesting, the EU were talking about something similar a few years back but nothing seems to have come from it, yet. The EU have already put power limits in place for other technologies, I know vacuum cleaners have had a limit for many years now. It will put more pressure on manufacturers to focus on power efficiency but at what cost to performance evolution.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Why not give subsidies to homeowners/businesses to install solar panels on roofs and windows, maybe even develop siding for houses that is solar panels.

I believe California already offers or had offered such, including tax credits. Also they passed a mandate that every new home built from Jan 2020 must have solar panels.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

I think that technology is moving that way anyway. I don't know that they'd have the manpower to go door to door. Or if they would. Thankfully I don't live in California. No desire to. But I could see them attempting like someone else said, to limit what graphics cards or power supplies or cpus are available. However, what could happen is you could end up with an underground marketplace, kind of like you picture for New York with guys selling fake rolex watches or something. Thinking about that is comical, but sad too. How much you bet computer shows start up in Nevada or neighboring states?

 

[hotaru.hino]

The thing is California is still a huge market in the US. Whatever California does, a lot of companies will adjust to that in order to stay in business, and rather than have another model for sale in more relaxed states, they just sell the "California" version. Take cars for instance. California's strict emissions standards have propagated to basically every state passively because car manufacturers don't want to effectively double the number of trims for a car just for one state (or several, since a lot of other states tend to follow in California's wake).

If anything this'll be a minor inconvenience to Dell and other PC manufacturers.

 

[bigdragon]

I understand the drive to push electronics manufacturers towards producing more efficient devices. Demand on the power grid is increasing, and generation is not. Worse, dirty power generation is far more economical than the green stuff. I get where CA and friends are coming from. However, this seems like one of those nuisance laws that will redirect computing and electronics revenues outside the state. I think it would have been more effective to target businesses and educators who have legions of PCs on 24/7 regardless of whether or not they're in use or getting a 10-minute update.

Why not give subsidies to homeowners/businesses to install solar panels on roofs and windows, maybe even develop siding for houses that is solar panels. If they wouldn't change anything like that, but would give incentives to people and make it affordable to do that, that would likely reduce strain on the grid because if you got a lot of energy from solar at your home, you wouldn't have to pull as much from the grid I wouldn't think.

Hey, woah, you can't do that. The HOA/Condo Board says that solar panels are an eyesore. You can't have them. No solar shingles or windows or siding or anything else either. You shall be limited to the same cookie cutter asphalt shingles and vinyl siding as everyone else. Conform. We can't have the HOA/Condo Board president's home worth less than the person with solar-everything and an EV! Yes, saving energy is important. Yes, climate change is bad. Yes, wildfires are bad. But HOA/Condo rules are rules!!!1! Our hands are tied!!!1!1!

 

[ohio_buckeye]

I saw something on YouTube recently, so the Sahara desert is roughly the size of China from what they said. According to the video if you had a solar panel field the size of New Mexico I think they said, they estimated you’d produce as much energy as the world used in 2019.

 

[Giroro]

I don't understand why anyone would think that capping the maximum power consumption of a computer would somehow make it more efficient.
That's not how efficiency is calculated for any other appliance, so why computers?
Efficiency is about the amount of work that can be accomplished per unit of energy, not the absolute energy usage. Energy star should know this fact; it's their entire purpose.
A modern computer might use 10x the power of a Commodore 64 but it has 10,000,000x the performance, which makes it more efficient.

Since the efficiency argument doesn't make any sense, then somebody must be lobbying against the sale of high performance computers for some other reason.
Controlling the means of production? Does Disney want to stop people from building a home render farm? Is big tech threatened by home servers? Does Activision-Blizzard want to stop developers from starting their own studios?

 

[hotaru.hino]

I saw something on YouTube recently, so the Sahara desert is roughly the size of China from what they said. According to the video if you had a solar panel field the size of New Mexico I think they said, they estimated you’d produce as much energy as the world used in 2019.

I don't understand why anyone would think that capping the maximum power consumption of a computer would somehow make it more efficient.
That's not how efficiency is calculated for any other appliance, so why computers?
Efficiency is about the amount of work that can be accomplished per unit of energy, not the absolute energy usage. Energy star should know this fact; it's their entire purpose.
A modern computer might use 10x the power of a Commodore 64 but it has 10,000,000x the performance, which makes it more efficient.

Since the efficiency argument doesn't make any sense, then somebody must be lobbying against the sale of high performance computers for some other reason.
Controlling the means of production? Does Disney want to stop people from building a home render farm? Is big tech threatened by home servers? Does Activision-Blizzard want to stop developers from starting their own studios?

The problem is how do measure efficiency in a computer? What standard do you go by? And how can make this easy to understand for the laymen?

Appliances are easy. Most of them serve one function and they have one or two values per watt you can compare it against. But computers? It's hard. They're a general purpose device. And there's no real industry accepted benchmark in which to test with because as it stands, everyone will just refute it and present their own reality.

EDIT: I suppose you could go with something like FLOPS or MIPS per watt, but you can get wildly different results depending on what test you give it.

EDIT 2: Also it's impossible anyway to make a standardized test because some tests can run more efficiently on some processors, but less efficiently on others, and vice versa.

 

[ohio_buckeye]

Yes, I think that's the one. You wouldn't have to cover the entire place, just one area. It also gives credence to the fact you could do more on placing panels on existing buildings etc which would take strain off the existing grid and thereby reduce emissions. Man, maybe I should have tried to be an engineer and made money haha. But I hate math, so....

 

[Eximo]

I saw something on YouTube recently, so the Sahara desert is roughly the size of China from what they said. According to the video if you had a solar panel field the size of New Mexico I think they said, they estimated you’d produce as much energy as the world used in 2019.

Power distribution becomes an issue, and then there is the whole sand problem. There are better places to build.

I think they should mandate every flat roofed commercial building, must install solar panels for new construction.

Parking lots could all have tresses put up to roof them over and have panels on top.

Solar panels on homes, yes, but it is a economic nightmare at the moment. Not cheap enough for every home and the retrofitting of old circuits and breaker boxes is quite the burden. Not enough installers either.

And then the issue of solar cell manufacturing. Would take a heck of a worldwide investment to built the manufacturing capability.

 

[AtrociKitty]

Question is where does it truly end?

There's already more coming, with another wave of restrictions hitting on December 9th. That round will ban: "computers with high-speed networking capability, multi-screen notebooks, notebooks with cyclical behavior, and monitors with high refresh rates"

 

[Giroro]

The problem is how do measure efficiency in a computer? What standard do you go by? And how can make this easy to understand for the laymen?

The same way every reviewer measures efficiency: you measure how much electricity is consumed for a computer to perform a standardized amount of work.

But, the real answer here is "you don't bother measuring it, because there is no reason whatsoever to regulate it". Computer and chip manufactures are already extremely motivated to make their devices run as efficiently as possible. Home computers, outside of very extreme edge cases like big crypto mining farms, is not a major "strain on the grid".

But again, I don't think that the high-performance computer ban actually has anything to do with saving energy. I think it exists because some mega coorporation hates competition and loves lawyers. Somebody on top wants to stay in power, so they lobby to stifle startups and grass roots innovation.

 

[CerianK]

I hope everyone stays up to date on the realities of what is actually going on and what is true before spouting about this stuff. Here are a few examples:

I believe California already offers or had offered such, including tax credits. Also they passed a mandate that every new home built from Jan 2020 must have solar panels.

California PG&E, and other providers, want to reduce subsidies and charge people $70/month for connecting their home solar into the grid.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article250185380.html

I saw something on YouTube recently, so the Sahara desert is roughly the size of China from what they said. According to the video if you had a solar panel field the size of New Mexico I think they said, they estimated you’d produce as much energy as the world used in 2019.

A recent report showed that the infrared heat signature of the dark solar panels placed in the Sahara would increase global warming.
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/giant-desert-solar-farms-might-have-unintended-climate-consequences

 

[caseym54]

All those Hollywood movie and music studios, and those Silicon Valley chip design firms are just going to have to accept that powerful workstations are a thing of the past.

Have they tried an abacus?

 

[Giroro]

All those Hollywood movie and music studios, and those Silicon Valley chip design firms are just going to have to accept that powerful workstations are a thing of the past.

Have they tried an abacus?

Weird. It's almost like they made sure the restrictions on personal computers don't apply to them, or something

 

[maestro0428]

Muahahaha! Dell makes garbage PCs. They literally make them as cheaply as they can. Its no wonder.

 

[drtweak]

::Me looking at my Edison bill after keeping my Gaming PC/Plex Server combo with 16 hard drives on all the time::

Hey at least I have a Corsair HX1200i Platinum. <Mod Edit> idle I'm only pulling 170 watts from the wall with all of that. and 160 pushed to the PC.

 

[Kahless01]

after seeing the build quality on gamers nexus those folks dont need to be shipping anything anywhere. alienware used to be the <Mod Edit>. now its just badge engineered dell garbage.

 

[kzVegas78]

Nothing like making a new account to post false and invented information. This change is due to a very real law, which is based on a number of factors including idle efficiency (it's not a restriction of total power consumption, nor is it based on the GPU itself). Dell even made an official statement:

I didn't create a new account just to post. I am angry that Dell did this using the "thinnest" of reasons. I've read the California legislation and no where in that bill does it specifically call out power levels. Besides it doesn't explain why a computer (the XPS) using the exact same kind of components (i7-11700K and RTX 3060) is allowable but an Aurora is not. I custom build PC's and those are the 2 biggest consumers of power in a gaming computer. The motherboard or power supply differences between an Aurora and a XPS make only very slight differences in power use either at full-power or idle.