Alienware no longer shipping high end gaming PCs to certain US States, citing new power consumption regulations

[GatoDelFuego]

6 minutes ago, Factory Factory said:

Okay there's a LOT of FUD in the coverage. I'm a paralegal and I did a deep dive of the regulations, specifically 20 CCR secs. 1605, 1604, 1602, and the Energy Star testing methodology.

 

tl;dr: The only reason the regs give that might block these particular Alienware systems is that their ACPI S3 Sleep state power consumption is over 10W from the wall. On a system that can have a 1000W power supply, that's actually not very surprising. It's hard to make big PSUs efficient at small loads. ATX12VO will help this in the long run.

 

So, about the regs and what they actually mean:

 

First, the yearly power consumption is not measured at load. The Energy Star methodology the regs refer to is a weighted average: yearly power consumption if the system is 55% turned off, 5% in sleep mode, and 40% idling at desktop. Load power consumption is not part of that power budget; it's all about idle-or-less power efficiency. When you include the beefy add-ons to the power budget for a discrete GPU, it's actually pretty easy for a modern machine, even DIY, to hit the power target. 

 

The biggest crunches will probably be mini-ITX gaming machines with limited ports, since ports are how expandability score is measured and more expandability = more power budget. But even so you'd need a comically small number of user-accessible internal and external ports (like base tier M1 iMac small) to hit the most stringent limits and be seriously threatened by a typical 65W desktop idle.

 

Second, "high expandability" machines are exempted from the yearly consumption altogether, like workstations. A high expandability machine is one that either has a shitload of ports (there's a table in 20 CCR 1604), or it has a 600W+ PSU and a GPU with 600 GB/s of VRAM bandwidth (20 CCR 1602). 

 

These machines' only requirements are:

• Use an 80+ Gold or better PSU (for internal PSUs)
• ACPI S3 Sleep state power draw is 10W at the wall or less, plus 0.15W per GB of RAM over 32
• If it's shipped with an OS installed, power management is configured to turn off the screen after 15 minutes and enter S3 sleep after 30 minutes

 

Third, DIY is definitely not affected. Small-run boutique builds under 50 units have the same requirements as the high-expandability/workstation requirements above. If you want to sell a build to a friend, that won't make you an energy criminal in California. 

Great summary, I was looking over these regulations yesterday and got dizzy, I was CERTAIN it was limiting power based on peak usage, but that's because the explanation for how to measure it was in an entirely separate regulation.

 

Classic legal eh

[wanderingfool2]

8 minutes ago, SlidewaysZ said:

I guarantee you my desktop averages more than 360wh/day even if I shut it off at night and I run a gold standard PSU. I mean have you seen some of the high end desktops available?  The average desktop idles at 100 watts. 360wh/day is 15w an hr

If you seriously think that it uses 100 watts at idle you are fooling yourself.  Let me guess, you just used the CNET article that said that (that was made 13 years ago...before power states really were a thing).  The calculation also puts nearly 50% of the weight in a poweroff/sleep state; as an fyi.

 

Even letting it sit on desktop, computers from 2 years ago were drawing 66 watts

 

Would like to point out that sitting on the desktop is not the same as being in idle (as after about 10 min. of no activity it would enter into a lower power state and use even less wattage).

[Fasterthannothing]

6 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

If you seriously think that it uses 100 watts at idle you are fooling yourself.  Let me guess, you just used the CNET article that said that (that was made 13 years ago...before power states really were a thing).  The calculation also puts nearly 50% of the weight in a poweroff/sleep state; as an fyi.

 

Even letting it sit on desktop, computers from 2 years ago were drawing 66 watts

 

Would like to point out that sitting on the desktop is not the same as being in idle (as after about 10 min. of no activity it would enter into a lower power state and use even less wattage).

No I'm looking at idle from users reporting their test results on Reddit https://amp.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ck6x1d/ive_saved_40w_in_my_pcs_idle_power_usage_already/

 

That person after reconfiguring everything to save power could only drop it down to 115w normal was 155w

[Mister Woof]

Depends on what you've got going on.

 

I just tested my system, and it bottomed out at 103w (bouncing around between 103-115w) after 5m on a Killowat meter at the desktop doing nothing.

 

 

10900KF (OC but with all power saving features enabled) @ 1.37v

Z590 mobo

4x8 32GB DDR4 1.35v

RTX 3080 (fans off)

1x NVME SSD

1x SATA SSD

1x mechanical 7200rpm hard drive

1x RGB keyboard USB

1x wireless mouse

6x120mm RGB fans

1 AIO pump

1x charging wireless earbuds over USB

1x xbox 1 controller USB

 

I can see if I removed all the RGB fans, accessories, no spinning disk, and ran only a basic setup, no overclocks, under 100w idle is more than possible.

 

At 3.6w per fan for RGB, that's enough to bring it under the 100w budget. And this is a fully decked out PC.

 

But then doesn't all those things I mentioned add expandability score, thus increasing its allowable power budget?

 

[tankyx]

[da na]

This whole ordeal is really dumb, but since it's Alienware I kinda don't care. Sadly if anything it will keep more people from getting scammed.

[Mister Woof]

12 minutes ago, Caroline said:

ah yes, the classic personal attack when you can't actually argue but pretend to

 

energy corps are the ones that pollute the most because, well, they have to extract the resources and process them to satisfy a neverending demand from the rest: plastics manufacturers, corps like coke, nestle, p&g, unilever, kraft, then you have guys like corteva agriscience, monsanto, syngenta, tyson, etc. big pharma labs, companies behind fast food packagings and merch, chinese mining corps looking for resources everywhere in order to keep silicon fabs and shit tech (phones, tablets, tech stuff in general with a <2 years lifetime due to planned obsolescence) manufacturers in the business and so on. A 5 second search on carbon majors can give you names.

 

I'm sure CA and the rest of the states push regulations but are those really useful for anything? and what about the rest of the world? it's ridiculous to "ban PCs" or blame it on the users for using, what, 300W? when there are other guys using 300MW and probably more. it's the same as blaming a global increase in the power demand on guys mining bitcoin with a GT1030.

 

 

 

Well, if I'm being honest, then there is a level of "whataboutism" even in my own posts. While there are certainly bigger fish to fry, that doesn't mean that trying to solve smaller problems such as consumer electronics doesn't also help.

 

Rarely is anything ever just a one-stop-shop; solving a big problem like energy has many small steps.

[poochyena]

16 minutes ago, Caroline said:

I'm sure CA and the rest of the states push regulations

Then your argument is completely meritless. All you can do now is move the goalpost and deflect.

[CarlBar]

18 minutes ago, Mister Woof said:

Rarely is anything ever just a one-stop-shop; solving a big problem like energy has many small steps.

 

This. Yes we need to deal with other issues but this isn't an especially arduous to comply with regulation, and it will help a bit.

 

I also think posters like @Caroline don't really get that the whole reason a huge amount of the CO2 producing stuff out there can't just be switched off unless you want the fabric of modern civilisation to collapse and leave everyone with a significant worse quality of life and lowered life expectancy as a result. The reality is everything you own, consume, and see has, or had, an energy cost associated with it's creation and somwhere along the way that energy cost has to be met by some means. Typically it's most often electricity, thats why a lot of regulations are focus there, if the electricity to KG's of carbon ratio is good enough you've got a significant chunk of the way there. The other main thing that can be done and is whats being attempted here is mandate more energy efficient processes. But in big industry generally the cost to make somthing is going to be closely tied to it's net energy cost so simple capitalism tends to take care of it. Exceptions exist and thats the stuff that gets regulated.

 

But you can't simply go out and tell many of the companies producing the bulk of the CO2 to stop producing it because the only way many of them can do that is to produce less goods which leads to shortages of those goods and well, look at the current GPU/CPU shortage for the reaction that will get you.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Factory Factory said:

 

• Use an 80+ Gold or better PSU (for internal PSUs) 

Well.. It's not that cut and dry.  Remember, 80 PLUS Gold only test efficiency at 20% and higher.  If you don't use a burst mode LLC front end, you can't achieve the lower load efficiency due to switching losses in the primary switchers.  My guess is the PSU Alienware is using is a standard LLC and has crap efficiency < 10%.

[Guest]

17 minutes ago, Mister Woof said:

 

Rarely is anything ever just a one-stop-shop; solving a big problem like energy has many small steps.

But this regulation has been years in the making.  1/1/2018 to be precise.  

[Brooksie359]

16 hours ago, Kisai said:

Though the intent was sarcastic, you do have to realize that the upper limit in the US has always been 1500w (one 15A circuit.) One gaming PC is between 650 and 1000w, and a HTPC or Workstation with two or more GPU's can easily hit 1500w.

 

Now, as for "oh no-fun california" type of comments. These are the same states that implement green standards first, because they benefit everyone EAST of them. Remember Acid Rain? You know what industries did? They made the smokestacks taller so the pollution would be spread over a wider area. Acid rain in North America has collectively declined by about 75% since 1980 due to such green rules.

 

So why now? Why gaming PC's? 

 

https://www.semiconductors.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/RITR-WEB-version-FINAL.pdf

 

Gaming PC's are collateral damage. This is being sped up by cryptomining, and various other energy-intensive computing, and we're seeing the beginnings of this problem in countries that had not moved swiftly enough to get on top of it, and now they're experiencing power cuts.

 

So by 2040, with no new generation capacity (Western North America's energy grid will be at less of a risk, but continent-wide there is very little room for new generation capacity without destroying some other resource in the process.)

 

This is regarding the idle power use, not active, though I suppose PC's with no iGPU probably make that harder to hit, and liquid cooled models have a pump constantly running, and if businesses had to make a choice, they would just buy everyone laptop's that can hit that target.

 

This probably does not apply to DIY builds, at least not self-assembly builds, as no part in a DIY build independently will go over the power budget. 

 

The crazy part is that California for all of their green energy initiatives has also hampered air conditioning efficiency in commercial buildings by requiring more outside air than basically all other states. I have had multiple times where a buildings could have gotten away with a smaller less power consuming air conditioning unit in most other states but because California is California we had to go with the bigger unit as the direct result of their outside air requirements being higher. Typically you can recycle alot of the air from the inside the building to be recooled rather than bringing in outside air and trying to cool it. I mean every place requires a certain amount of outside air but California is the one with the highest requirements. 

[Factory Factory]

1 hour ago, jonnyGURU said:

Well.. It's not that cut and dry.  Remember, 80 PLUS Gold only test efficiency at 20% and higher.  If you don't use a burst mode LLC front end, you can't achieve the lower load efficiency due to switching losses in the primary switchers.  My guess is the PSU Alienware is using is a standard LLC and has crap efficiency < 10%.

 

In terms of the regs, it is that cut and dry. It specifies 20%, 50%, and 100% numbers identical to 80+ Gold. In terms of meeting the low-load efficiency, the regs don't care how as long as it's done. The requirement is watts at the wall, not percentages.

[ajmorin369]

18 hours ago, Mister Woof said:

Summary

Due to new power consumption regulations on consumer computer devices, Dell/Alienware isn't shipping certain high-end gaming PCs to select states. In December 2021, this will also apply to other devices such as high refresh gaming monitors.

 

Quotes

 

My thoughts

I am a bit concerned about this, as I am not aware if it only applies to pre built OEM/SI systems, or also individual DIY parts, and even so, I don't know how this will affect other non DIY parts. I can't see a way to get around not being able to buy high refresh gaming monitors, for one.

 

Sources

 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2021/07/26/dell_energy_pcs/

 

 

Here's an article about the ban on certain gaming PCs and which states as well as why this is happening. 

 

https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/688435-gaming-pc-ban-california-colorado-hawaii-oregon-vermont-washington

 

I think this is a little heavy handed even though I understand what they are trying to do it just seems a little heavy handed at trying to solve an energy/global climate change. 

 

[Factory Factory]

2 hours ago, Mister Woof said:

Depends on what you've got going on.

 

I just tested my system, and it bottomed out at 103w (bouncing around between 103-115w) after 5m on a Killowat meter at the desktop doing nothing.

 

 

10900KF (OC but with all power saving features enabled) @ 1.37v

Z590 mobo

4x8 32GB DDR4 1.35v

RTX 3080 (fans off)

1x NVME SSD

1x SATA SSD

1x mechanical 7200rpm hard drive

1x RGB keyboard USB

1x wireless mouse

6x120mm RGB fans

1 AIO pump

1x charging wireless earbuds over USB

1x xbox 1 controller USB

 

I can see if I removed all the RGB fans, accessories, no spinning disk, and ran only a basic setup, no overclocks, under 100w idle is more than possible.

 

At 3.6w per fan for RGB, that's enough to bring it under the 100w budget. And this is a fully decked out PC.

 

But then doesn't all those things I mentioned add expandability score, thus increasing its allowable power budget?

 

The 3080 alone, assuming you have a 600W PSU or bigger, exempts you from the power budget... if this were a prebuilt system being sold. Your DIY build has no efficiency requirements whatsoever.

 

Let's pretend that's not the case for a moment: The add-ons for power budget are covered in 20 CFR 1605, Table V-8. Your system would get these adders:

 

• 26 kWh/yr for a 3.5" non-primary hard disk
• 0.5 kWh/yr for a non-primary SATA SSD
• 14.7*tanh(0.008*B-0.03)+5.5+(0.0055*B) kWh/yr for a first discrete GPU, where B is memory bandwidth in GB/s. For an average 3080 (760 GB/s), that's about 24 kWh.
• 4 kWh/yr if your board has 2.5Gb ethernet

--

 

Anyhoo, let's expand a bit on the "expandability score":

 

Quote

“High expandability computer” means a computer with any of the following:

    (1) An expandability score of more than 690;

    ....

    (3) If the computer is manufactured on or after January 1, 2020, a power supply of 600 watts or greater and either:

        (A) a first discrete GPU with a frame buffer bandwidth of 600 gigabytes per second (GB/s) or greater; or

        (B) a total of 8 gigabytes or more of system memory with a bandwidth of 632 GB/s or more and an integrated GPU.

 

20 CCR 1602, "High Expandability Computer".

 

These are the factors (but not all the "how to" words) for expandability score:

 

 

20 CCR 1604, Table V-1.

 

This table is kind of dumb... but it kind of works out? Not gonna spend a lot of time on the calculation details, since 65W idle in the applicable EPA formula, if it meets the 10W sleep requirement, works out to about 42 kWh/year, and even a minimally-"Expandable" computer can do that under the regs.

 

The categories for energy budget are ES <= 250, 250 < ES <= 425, and 425 < ES <= 690.

 

 

20 CCR 1605, Table V-7.

 

ES >= 690 or otherwise meeting the definition of a high expandability computer is not there in the table and doesn't have a yearly off/idle power budget. Just this idle requirement:

 

20 CCR 1605, Table V-6.

 

 

 

[Factory Factory]

Also if anyone cares, here's the Energy Star 6.0 for Computers way to measure idle power draw:

 

 

Short idle is "5 minutes after boot" or when generally looking at the desktop while doing nothing. Long idle is "15 minutes after boot, monitor turned off, mechanical disks spun down, but not sleeping".

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Factory Factory said:

 

In terms of the regs, it is that cut and dry. It specifies 20%, 50%, and 100% numbers identical to 80+ Gold. In terms of meeting the low-load efficiency, the regs don't care how as long as it's done. The requirement is watts at the wall, not percentages.

No.  I have the actual documents here because... it's my job.    There's a low load requirement that 80 PLUS does not cover.

 

Maybe you're not looking at the Tier II TEC limits that went into effect on July 1st.  Tier 1, which has been since 2019, only required Gold efficiency with no consideration for low load efficiency.  Yes... they're talking about watts from the wall and not percentages, but they're really one in the same.  You can't accomplish lower power consumption at lower loads without having a PSU that is more efficient at lower loads.  You cannot simply have an "80 PLUS Gold" PSU and meet the requirements because that PSU is not necessarily efficient at < 10% loads.

 

You'll also note that some of the Alienware PCs that can ship are using an NVMe boot drive while those that can't use a platter drive while all other factors are the same.  Again, this is due to the load load efficiency requirements and the additional power required for the platter drive to spin.

[da na]

This was quite informative of what is actually going on.

[aisle9]

The greatest service Alienware could do for gamers is to stop shipping PCs entirely.

[GDRRiley]

https://sites.google.com/site/greeningthebeast/home

(IDK why its self signed, someone was lazy)

this is some of the work thats been done in California by Lawrence Berkley National labs to figure out how much power gaming uses.

I know the people who worked on this, yes the FAQs and the site aren't prefect but here is one of the studies that help lead to this rule change
 

[Guest]

17 minutes ago, Mel0nMan said:

This was quite informative of what is actually going on.

The Intel document that he references is the most complete/digestible.  I guess it's no longer NDA. 

 

[TheMcSame]

1 hour ago, ajmorin369 said:

 

 

Here's an article about the ban on certain gaming PCs and which states as well as why this is happening. 

 

https://www.gamerevolution.com/news/688435-gaming-pc-ban-california-colorado-hawaii-oregon-vermont-washington

 

I think this is a little heavy handed even though I understand what they are trying to do it just seems a little heavy handed at trying to solve an energy/global climate change. 

 

Heavy handed but I'm not surprised at all. The consumer gets shafted again because of 'MuH cLiMaTe ChAnGe' when the fact of the matter is that big business, shipping, foreign manufacturing, etc are the ones that need to be chased up and hit with much harsher regs. Of course, California only has so much sway. They can't hit some company over in China with their regs. But global problems require global solutions. But it seems like the only solution going is to shaft the consumer at every opportunity and tell them to throw out their old stuff for these new 'green' products. Regardless of whether they're actually better or even ready to serve the market the same way their 'dirty' counterparts did.

 

There's no way in hell all us John Does and Jane Smiths are making a dent in global emissions in comparison to all the big industries. Hell, is it still true that just a handful of the largest container ships pollute just as much as every single car in the world combined?

[Blademaster91]

4 hours ago, SlidewaysZ said:

No I'm looking at idle from users reporting their test results on Reddit https://amp.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ck6x1d/ive_saved_40w_in_my_pcs_idle_power_usage_already/

 

That person after reconfiguring everything to save power could only drop it down to 115w normal was 155w

Interesting they didn't test turning PBO off, some boards are "auto" by default and sometimes auto means its on, or try undervolting the CPU.

[GDRRiley]

did the math (should be right) on 2 boards I got around me on if they would be except
seems like most mATX board and smaller will not be unless they got thunderbolt or a bunch of USB3.1/3.2

(and this assumes an SI would use one of them, it doesn't matter for DIY)
b450m steel legends

Spoiler

USB2.0 2x5

USB3.1 6X10

USB3.2 2x15

unconnected USB2.0 2x20

PCIE X16 2x75

PCIE X1 1x25

SATA 4x15

m.2 1x10

m.2 pcie 1x25

8gb+ memory +100

+100 base

=590

 

B550A vision D

Spoiler

USB2.0 2x5

USB3.1 6X10

USB3.2 2x15

thunderbolt 2x30 (assumed at least 30W)

unconnected USB2.0 2x20

PCIE X16 3x75

SATA 4x15

m.2 pcie 2x25

8gb+ memory +100

+100 base

=735

[Curufinwe_wins]

in case people are wondering, how reasonable are these standards actually?

 

I'm going to calculate my ETEC of my fully custom watercooled computer with overclocked 9700K and biomodded overclocked 980ti with a 5 year old 80+ gold G2 power supply. The weighting standard is 15% off, 45% sleep, 10% long idle, 30% short idle. Off is obviously 0. Sleep just measured from my UPS is <1W. I don't have long and short idle different in my computer, but right now typing this I'm sitting at 80W and true idle is at 76W. So lets use those two values.

 

ETEC=8760/1000*(.15*0+.45*1+.1*76+.3*80)=280.

Okay, so what is my computer allowed, should it be regulated the same way as a prebuilt?

 

Allowed is 100 (base) + 4 +.15*32 (ram) +.9 (EE Ethernet)+4.5+63.0 (d gpu)+4(attached 1GBe)+25(add in 10gbe card)= 206.

 

So my custom watercooled, limited idle power states, tons of rgb, tons of ran, overclocked computer is a whopping 26% short of the target (if it had been regulated, which it isn't).

 

Lets see if I can fix that by doing anything, swapping to balanced power mode (default version), returning cpu and gpu to stock clocks, voltages, power settings, I got to 58 W idle. At 58W, the new ETEC is 203, which is a go.

 

 

For reference to what is actually possible:

• Zotac's ancient 7700 + 1080 prebuilt idled at 33W.
• Ghost Caynon idles at 35W,
• GPU-less things like Asrock's desk mini (10700) manages to idle at 15W.
• 2018 Mac Mini idles at 20W (3.2GHz 6-core Intel Core i7, 64GB DDR4, 2TB SSD).
• M1 Mac Mini Idles at 7W.

All of these prebuilts would meet the current standard without an issue regardless their expansion/connectivity. Dell needs to up their game and stop selling crap with tons of bloatware that increases idle power usage if they are remotely close to exceeding these limits. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16335/asrock-deskmini-h470-review-a-nofrills-lga1200-minipc-platform/10  https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201897

 

TL:DR, parts with bog standard configurations have no problem meeting these particular limits under their default specifications and arrangements. With additional tuning huge amounts better than the standard are currently possible, and the ONLY way Dell actually fails these limits (assuming it is a failure and not just a wait for cert thing), is if they are shipping with so much bloat as to be craptasticly bad. In which case, if this is actually the thing that stops them from their 'warrantee with e-waste attached to it' tactics... well about time.