For the time being, Dell is no longer shipping certain Alienware Aurora R12 and R10 gaming PC configurations to half a dozen US states because those product lines potentially fall out of bounds of newly adopted energy efficiency requirements.
“This product cannot be shipped to the states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, or Washington due to power consumption regulations adopted by those states. Any orders placed that are bound for those states will be canceled,” the message states.
I wonder if any PC I’ve built in the last decade including the one I’m typing this message on would even come close to passing this standard, I would guess not since the only criteria I used to build any of them was performance.
If I want to conserve energy with them I put them to sleep or turn them off. ;)
That can’t be right. A device using only 100w of energy 24 hours a day will consume 876kWh/year. According to that article the LEAST stringent restriction is 75kWh/year.
To meet that threshold, your computer would need to consume an average of 8.5 watts of energy. I doubt most laptops meet that standard. They’re around 15w when not sleeping-- on battery. They charge much higher than that, charging batteries has inefficiencies, and that power has to come from somewhere.
If you’re used to using 75W incandescent bulbs in your house from years ago, the equivalent power-sipping LED bulb uses TEN WATTS. It wouldn’t be usable in California, left on 24/7.
Looking at cornchip’s link, it’s 75kWH/yr plus the stuff in Table v8. Table v8 has power allowances for memory, video cards, etc. So 75kWh/year is the most stringent restriction, not the least. That’s if you computer has no video card, memory, etc.
So weird - when that original thread came up I searched online and found a bunch of stories about how Alienware was able to start shipping PCs to California again. That was only a couple weeks ago, so I guess they learned something new between then and now.
My guess is this is only a story with Dell because they’re on top of the new regulations where most others are not. I doubt configurations of the HP Omen pass muster either…
Ahh, OK. So what is the Wh/year cap for a desktop with a multicore CPU, 16GB RAM, a hard drive, and a discrete GPU?
Edit: Looking at the charts in that link,
Looking at the chart:
75.0 KWh/yr: desktop PC manufactured after 7/1/21
06.4: 16GB RAM
00.9: ethernet
00.5: SSD
50.4: GPU with memory bandwidth 912GB/sec (RTX3080)
--------
133.2 KWh/yr
That comes out to an average of 15 watts, running 24/7. Obviously that is also far too low so there must be some calculation assuming, like, 8 hours of uptime per day or something.
