Energy Efficiency Rules Will Make It Even Harder To Get A New Gaming PC In Some States

Cryptomining Is Just Fine Though?

If you live in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont or Washington then you are going to have some difficulty getting a hold of new Dell gaming PCs as their higher end models apparently do not meet the energy efficiency laws in place in those states.  Their basic idea is good, in order to reduce the effect that personal computers have on climate change, they have set limits on the maximum amount of KWh/yr based on the type of system it is and the number of peripherals installed in it.

The implementation on the other hand, seems to once again attempt to shift the majority of the blame for climate change onto the consumer.  This attempt is somewhat undermined by California’s own documentation which states that laptops, desktops and workstations make up 3% of residential energy use in the state.  The consumption calculations acknowledge that computers do have sleep and low power consumption modes which would generally keep ones usage under the maximum amount of yearly power consumption but the percentages seem to assume a desktop will be running under a full load far more often than is normal. 

That leads to cryptomining, which would indeed guarantee a desktop was running under full load the majority of the time.  Instead of trying to deal with something which consumes a huge amount of power, Bitcoin alone used 9.13GW yesterday which is well down from over 130GW back in May, the state governments are punishing everyone who might need a high powered system for more reasonable usage. 

At this time, only the Dell Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 Gaming Desktop will be prevented from shipping to these states, but the restrictions will tighten over the coming years and many more systems may find themselves banned in those six states.  The restrictions also apply to mobile devices, laptops, TVs and monitors to name just a few.

The Register has a brief breakdown of the overall regulations as well as a link to the actual legal documents if you want to calculate if adding a new GPU will be allowed using the formula 58.6*tanh(0.0038*B-0.137)+26.8, where “B” is frame buffer bandwidth measured in GB/s.