Guest essay by Eric Worrall
I have long predicted Californian support for the green revolution would evaporate the moment it interfered with coffee deliveries to Starbucks. But I never dreamed California would mess with the gamers.
Dell won’t ship energy-hungry PCs to California and five other US states due to power regulations
Energy efficiency rules appear to be limiting the availability of gaming rigs
Thomas Claburn in San Francisco
Mon 26 Jul 2021 // 21:35 UTCDell is no longer shipping energy-hungry gaming PCs to certain states in America because they demand more energy than local standards allow.
Customers seeking to purchase, for example, an Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition R10 Gaming Desktop from Dell’s website and have it shipped to California are now presented with a message that tells buyers they’re out of luck.
“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,” the website says. “Any orders placed that are bound for those states will be canceled.”
Dell confirmed to The Register that the California ban was down to power consumption regulations, saying:
Yes, 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.
…
Read more: https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/26/dell_energy_pcs/
Obviously the most elite gamers would sneer at the idea of buying rigs off Dell, or buying any pre-made rig, they are much more likely to assemble their own water cooled overclocked monstrosity in their mum’s basement.
But gamers are in some senses serious people, frequently the kind of nerds who could take down a government system in their lunch break, before the coffee gets cold. Even a suggestion the Californian State Government could starve them of their high end MMORPG fix could end badly for California’s green energy zealots.
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But of course they can’t have high-end, heat-generating computers — they cause global warming … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C6VIdnWT38
Couldn’t they use the heat to heat the building, it’s electric!
Yes — depending on your latitude and/or season. But as long as temperatures and CO2 keep rising, we’ll soon return to the dinosaur climate, where the need for heaters becomes much less — and less need to burn fossil fuels … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SxuNQSeu_k
Here is a very good, detailed explanation of the current issue…
https://youtu.be/N5fc5ZX6Kzk
Currently, it only pertains to pre-built PCs, one can still home build their mega-gaming PC, for the moment..
Regards..
MikeH
This is getting some discussion even on the gun-nut boards. The next step is for some enterprising techie to start offering “90% motherboards” on craigslist.
Lower CPU receivers?
What’s about Climate models running supercomputers ? EOL ?
😀
That should be a problem in Boulder Colorado at NCAR. After all climate models are just another form of computer game.
Which is why NCAR put their Supercomputing center up the road in Cheyenne, Wyoming where cheap natural gas and coal fired electricity powers the grid and away from virtue signalling Colorado State regulators.
And don’t forget about the supercomputers at LLNL running climate models. Yes, the very same national lab that formerly employed Ben Santer. And, yes, the Ben Santer who recently resigned when LLNL “allowed” Dr. Koonin to speak (sorry to point any traffic here, but for those who wish a link, here it is: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/santer-koonin-climate_n_60ad529fe4b0a24c4f821f58).
Note that LLNL gets most of its electrical power from a US government owned power feed. Thus LLNL is largely immune from death-wish California’s skyrocketing electric rates.
Archive copy: https://archive.ph/PYCJm
I think you’re partly right, however, computer games carry the risk of multiple outcomes, whereas climate models only have one possible outcome, therefore they are not considered a game in the true sense!!! Much wamry, warmy, hot, hot, warmy hot!!!
A. Climate: Completely unpredictable
B. Climate Models: Completely predictable
But somehow the Eco-Nazis think B will tell us what A will be, based on variation of one meaningless variable.
These models are as close to reality as any MMORPG
I thought they all used Commodore 64s.
They won’t use C-64’s. No color for their cool graphics. At least mine is not color.
That’s different. It’s OK for climate alarmists to ignore the rules they set down for the little people because they’re working to save the planet and all that.
Same reason we’re all supposed to give up our cars and never travel by air, but it’s perfectly OK for them to all take private Jets to their climate confab in Tahiti. Their
vacationsummit is saving the world…we’re just being selfish.That’s like climate alarmists taking private planes to attend far flung summits.
It’s justified by their need to save the planet. Only a science denier would disagree. /sarc
They can do the gaming on higher power machines at government offices and labs….while writing new regulations.
Useless computers have to take their place in line with useless vacuum cleaners and useless dishwashers.
The worst are low flush toilets that have to be flushed several times before “it” goes down the drain. They actually waste more water then the old fashioned kind.
Old toilets are as you describe if they are made just after the water restriction were enacted. Low flow toilets made in the last 10 years actually work well because the bowl and traps were redesigned. There is enough wealth and population on the left coast that the computers manufacturers will figure it out (or find a way to rig the test and specs like VW did with diesels).
No they do not work at all well. They are fine if fitted to the idealised conditions they were designed for but if retro fitted to a real installation on average they require five flushes to work. If you look at the installation information it requires around five degrees more slope than existed for the old fashioned ones on a typical horizontal run length. The drainage blockage clearance company showed the camera for many installations had a common fault that the sewage moved a run of a metre or so and soon built up at that point as there was insufficient water to carry solids any further. Mine were supposedly redesigned two years ago and installed soon after. They suggested a building supplies recovery company to get old pre eco models as the only real answer to the problem for us.
Without getting into the details, it’s usually three flushes.
There are both natural and prescription remedies for that, Steve.
😜
Can you imagine the amount of water vegans use going for a number 2 six times a day…………
That’s a load of old flush!!! ;-))
Actually it only takes one flush.
Just hold down the handle and let the tank drain.
yup almost every public toilet in Aus that had those dual flushers
has disabled the half flush
funny that!
many millions of dollars to replace and all the old ones got trashed making more landfill
Ah yes… gubbmint. If it ain’t broke,
don’t fix itban it and replace it with something that doesn’t work.Can you get the kind of flush mechanism common in public restrooms (big handle on the left, flushes for as long as you hold down the handle) for home use, or are the plumbing requirements too different?
And useful, but low efficiency batteries.
Does that mean no “bit coin” processing either…..
YES, it does….and furthermore….AIR CONDITIONING has gotta go. A government sponsored Youth Green Corps will report all infractions immediately…the government must control and will control all man made climate change causing activities and endeavors.
That sounds a lot like the Red Guards. We have lost the cultural knowledge that lynch mobs are seriously bad news. It’s a lesson folks will have to re-learn the hard way.
I believe it’s more that the leftists actually believe that this time the Red Guards will only be used against those they despise. Since they will be the ones in charge, the Red Guards would never come for them.
Thank you. You have brightened my day. I obviously needed a good laugh.
might be time to buy deoderant co shares;-)))
No cryptominer who actually has to pay for the electricity they use is going to use CalISO’s expensive electricity to mine coin. That’s why crypto miners either steal the electricity in some rip-off scheme or set-up in locales where electricity is cheap.
For example:
British Cops Thought They Were Raiding a Weed Farm, But Found Bitcoin Instead
https://gizmodo.com/british-cops-thought-they-were-raiding-a-weed-farm-but-1846991137
I remember seeing a TV programme a couple of years ago which interviewed a very wealthy Icelander who had built a huge warehouse in Iceland full of hundreds, if not thousands, of computers intended to mine bitcoin using their abundant geothermal power sources.
So am I to understand that those wonderfully accurate global warming models are done with energy efficient Sinclair ZX81s? Pray tell.
These old TI – pocket calculators with graphic mode (TI 80 or so) wouldt be good enough to calculate some wrong temperature curves… 😀
ZX81?!? Wow, that’s a blast from the past. Would be better to network your Sinclair QL’s. You could do a peer-to-peer with 64 units. Cray, watch out!
I’m pretty sure the first home computer I used was a ZX80?
My first computer was an IBM clone 8086 with 640k ram and a 20gig hard drive plus 2 two 5 and 1/4 inch floppy drives. DOS 3.2. It had an EGA monitor with 16 colors. That was back in 1986 and it cost a small fortune compared to today.
20gig, I don’t think so. More likely it was only 20Meg.
My first desktop was a 80186, with 640K and a 75Meg hard drive.
My first in 1970 was a Data General Nova with 8K of core memory, no screen, mass storage on an ASR33 Teletype paper tape punch at 10 characters a second and machine language. Later got Basic that consumed 80% of the memory just to load.
But, it was accurate. I predicted that many homes would have a computer by 2000 and they did. Geoff S
My first experience with a DIGITAL “personal” computer was with a PDP8 in 1970 purchased by the university for the electrical engineering department use. Of course the university had an IBM mainframe along with a large number of keypunch machines for us novice programmers.
In prior years, I got many hours of experience using analog computer modules to solve problems. I still think those would be better for climate scientists since it would force them to develop the correct equations for each and every component.
My first real personal computer was a Sinclair ZX80 with a cassette tape machine and 16kB of memory. I later added a printer using thermal paper. What fun!
Hi Mark your right it was so long ago I’d forgotten about megabytes.
Yup. It would have been about 20 Meg.
I was a fan of the Commodore 64 myself. Wrote a couple of neat programs for it as well!
I am still a fan. The 64 was excellent for teaching elementary programming to my 3rd and 4th graders. If I had to do that again, I’d be real happy with a room full of C64s.
My dad bought one of those. It might still by around somewhere. It was integer-only arithmetic, and I think it was a maximum of +65,536 to -65,536. IIRC, someone wrote a program to allow decimal arithmetic, but it was just proof-of-concept, nothing you could really use.
Unless it was a 17 bit machine, it was probably +32,768 to -32,767. Unsigned it would have been 65,536.
Mark, you are probably right, now that you mention it.
Mine was a C64 in the 80s. Didn’t get a PC until the 90s.
I have a cardboard box with7 Sinclair/Timex zx81s, one printer, a cassette tape drive, and a 16
GBMBk memory module. Make an offer.“Make an offer.”
Yeah, I do that and I might as well invite you to my funeral, ’cause my wife will kill me.
y = mx + b doesn’t require much computing power.
But climate models are a self-licking ice-cream cone. Each new GCM run provides nothing of value or utility now. That’s why they uncertainty window has never narrowed, only gotten wider with time, as each new output is just another error propagation exercise.
Now they are a make-work industry, much like NASA’s manned space program, that keeps thousands of PhDs and computer engineers employed.
They appear to be almost totally rectally derived.
now do high speed quad chair ski lifts
Diesel-electric powered in many places.
Let the smuggling begin.
No smuggling involved. It is still legal to possess such a computer in Cal. Just not to sell one.
Sounds like a plot for Big Bang Theory 🙂 – a Tesla expedition to get a high end gaming computer.
A Plot for Big Bang?
Seriously, has anyone ever watched those youtube vids where they have edited the audio to remove the laugh track? It isn’t comfortable.
Big Bang Theory is virtual signalling for the sort of ‘popular’ people who used to bully people at school for daring to enjoy reading books. They resent the fact that many of these nerds now have better paying jobs and more filled lives and watch Big Bang to tick a check box (“See? Some of my best friends are complete nerds… I just don’t let myself be seen in public with them… Also some of my other best friends are minorities as well!”) while still reinforcing their core belief that anyone who likes board games should be taken back to high school and re-stuffed into a locker.
I just want a shower head with a decent flow rate.
Just remove the built-in flow restriction. It’s pretty easy to find online. I was incensed when I discovered this. I want my flow the way I like it, and my water falls from the sky, so I often have too much.
I don’t know if it’s all, but some shower MANIFOLDS now limit volume. That can only be fixed by pulling it out of the wall and replacing it.
Thanks to Zhou Bai-den, you’re not allowed to have that.
When the hell did the Federal ‘effing Government get in the business of telling me what kind of shower head I may (or may not) have???
Shortly after they told you how much water your toilet can use in a flush and what kind of light bulb you can’t use.
We are on a well, 500 feet deep, and shared with no one. To say that I’m pissed about the restrictions on new toilets would reflect my reaction, though it would be inaccurate…but I can’t come up with a correct expression (nothing solid, anyway).
Sorry, but I can only click the upvote once, Michael.
I recently moved into a new house (South Australia) whereby the building rules mandate that toilet cisterns must be supplied from a 1000 litre rainwater tank with mains backup.
Stupidly, this only has to supply one cistern and we have two toilets, the second attached only to mains.
The stupid, it hurts
When the land developer wanted to doze another farm into high density housing, and was told to secure the water first. So the developer’s plan was savings through economy. If we only get some percentage of the population to reduce this percentage of use, we’ll have abundant water to complete our project.
Voila! someone is making money at your expense.
No worries! I have 80 psi at my house.
EPA shower heads flow adequately if you have the correct water pressure. Unfortunately many bathrooms don’t.
They flow even better when you drill out the volume restriction and use the shower valve to regulate the flow to your liking just as the plumbing was originally designed
This topic has come up on various news sites over the past few days. What is unclear in the discussions is whether the issue is total annual energy consumption, or whether this relates to idle power states.
Even funnier – you can have your high end PC but it has a mandatory 2 min no activity power down.
So if mum demands you get up and empty your laundry hamper into the washing machine, you lose your place in the quest for the sword of Azeroth…
That’s easily avoided by launching an app that simulates keyboard or mouse activity.
It is both annual consumption and standby power A chart from Tom’s Hardware. Scroll down to Table V-7. Maximum annual power for a desktop is 100+ kilowatt-hours/year
I recall — 6 or 8 years ago — Alienware was doing high end gaming rigs.
Just repeating info from a friend.
They’ve been doing so for years, selling through Dell. All my work computers have been Alienware for decades, highest spec possible because a new computer took me days to set up and I wanted to avoid the time wasted. I also liked the tax-deduction for my gaming wants 🙂
My final laptop was bought in 2013. It’s still going, and still beats the pants off most laptops I’ve seen.
Sounds like a good opening for someone to boot-leg. or drop-ship to a UPS store in Vegas
Claim: The Big Bang Theory is a realistic TV show about the sciency thinking and personal academic dynamics of academic science nerds.
Change my mind!
All Seasons of TBBT in one pic.
It isn’t realistic…it’s too funny.
Watching real people in academia is just sad – it’s about ignorance, bad science, lack of scientific understanding, lack of ethics and morality, greed, protection of reputation above all else, and group think.
Schadenfreude.
I think most high end gamers, certainly those who know how to put those over-clocked power-hungry computer rigs together also know that Climate Change is a Trojan Horse scam for politcal power by Left.
Warlock command center scene from Die Hard 4
Do the same rules apply to gaming cryptocurrencies!?
Next the need to ban mining for bitcoins, which is incredibly energy intensive and pointless.
So are all those cell phones used in the world 😉
There’s already been talk that bitcoin mining is bad for the environment, so it wouldn’t surprise me.
Also SETI@home
Speaking of the nerds in Mom’s basement, it’s still legal to buy every single part in that Dell system, and assemble it themself. Or taking that box of components to your favorite computer repair store and having them assemble it. It’s only illegal to have Dell do it for you.
Morons…
If you are referring to the typical legislator, you are being redundant.
Seems more like a job requirement these days.
Having experience building computers beginning back in the 1990s, and having done a few specifically to be “low-power,” I pondered how a desktop could be too powerful.
The banned models are: Dell Alienware Aurora R12, and Aurora R10.
The R12 can be chosen with these processors:
i5-11400F: 65W
i7-11700F: 65W
i7-11700KF: 125W
i9-11900KF: 125W
65 watts is very middle-of-the-road. 125W is typical for a high-performance processor. But 125-watt processors are not being banned.
What is different on these models is this: the capacity to run from 8 GB ram up to 128 GB ram. This can be safely “over-volted” to 1.35 volts. So, at 8gb, the computer ram is using 8 x 1.35 = 10.8 volts, while if configured with 128 gb would be burning 128 x 1.35 volts = 173 volts.
When planning a build, I do not consider the ram power draw when figuring out how powerful a power supply I need. 10 volts is not big enough relative to processor, vid card.
But 170 volts is!
In CA, you can order the 8gb model, but not higher levels of gb, 16 – 128.
So, the work-around is: order the 8gb model.Upgrade your machine to 16, 32, 64, or 128 as you like.
RAM is about the easiest upgrade you can do.
“. So, at 8gb, the computer ram is using 8 x 1.35 = 10.8 volts, while if configured with 128 gb would be burning 128 x 1.35 volts = 173 volts.”
Someone needs to learn a bit of basic electrical theory before posting on the subject
A good start would be to learn the difference power and energy, what a volt and a watt are and the difference between serial and parallel . 🙂
FWIW, 8GB of RAM will draw about 3W, so 128GB will draw around 48W. @ur momisugly 1.35V or whatever you have “over-volted” to.
In computers, the wattage does not measure electricity, but heat. On YouTube, the Gamers Nexus channel has a video about wattage, called TDP.
Here is something else. Intel defines TDP as the minimum amount of cooling needed to use their product. But AMD defines TDP as the typical amount of cooling needed. Therefore, some 65W Intel processor can easily draw 250 watts of electricity from the wall with proper cooling whereas a 65W AMD processor will typically not need more than 90 watts of electricity.
Add to that the video card in high-end machines. A NVidia RTX 3090 video card can easily use 350 watts of electricity from the wall. An Intel processor with a RTX 3090 can draw over 650 watts from the wall once you factor in other typical system power. To say this will heat up a room in a hurry would be an understatement. The push for more efficient processors is the focus of the next generation from both AMD and Intel.
“Intel defines TDP as the minimum amount of cooling needed to use their product.”
Actually, Intel defines TDP as “TDP stands for Thermal Design Power, in watts, and refers to the power consumption under the maximum theoretical load. The TDP is the maximum power that one should be designing the system for. This ensures operation to published specs under the maximum theoretical workload.“
i.e. it’s maximum electrical power draw, not heating or cooling per se. But since most of the energy consumed by a processor ends up as heat energy, that tells us the maximum heat per unit of time (joulers/sec?) that will need to be dissipated from the processor and should be used along with the maximum power draw of all the other system components to determine the amount of cooling required.
Dell is no longer shipping energy-hungry gaming PCs to certain states in America because they demand more energy than local standards allow. – article
How sad…. NOT!!! I wondered when things might start to hit the wall with that whole shtick. Didn’t take as long as I thought it would.
I’d love to see car manufacturers stop shipping cars to California due to their “special” requirements (which unfortunately have been adopted by some other states).
Then sit back and see how long it takes for the revolt to occur as people can no longer buy the latest greatest cars.
As posted previously, ridicule is now our best response. This one is very good.
My fav, however, still is the EU Watts limit on electric tea kettles (not a joke). What they forgot was that water takes a certain amount of heat to boil (basic physics). So if you halve the wattage of, say, a 2 liter tea kettle, you double the time it takes to boil water and achieve exactly nothing. What they should have done is limit the water capacity per kettle to, say, a liter—is still about 4 standard cups of tea. Just tough if you are serving 8. Buy two kettles or else!
But the EU ‘green’ regulatory capacity extended only to kettle energy consumption, not capacity. Dumb and dumber.
They are waking up to it:
https://motls.blogspot.com/2021/07/eus-war-on-humor.html?m=1
They’ve done the same with vacuum cleaners. Can’t suck worth a shit (unlike Democrats), so it takes twice as long to do the same cleaning.
Like many contemporary products, they fail as practical, useable tools appropriate for the purpose for which they were procured.
But they LOOKED really slick & sexy, and came in a range of fashion colors.
Approved by 128 of the most-followed instagram ‘influencers’.
“Everyone” is buying one . . .
(And we wonder why our landfill garbage dumps get filled up in no time flat.)
My rule of thumb is that if the advertising for the appliance or device talks about saving energy, I don’t buy it.
Ditto. The fewer ‘energy stars’ an appliance has, the better it works.
Are you sure? I thought Bill had to outsource this activity.
Not true, it will achieve something:
By taking longer, the kettles will allow more heat to escape (impossible to prevent this). This means that these new ‘green’ kettles will actually use MORE energy to boil the same amount of water!
🤣🤣🤣
Only dumb if you thought the intention was to save electricity rather than sell more kettles.
EU is firmly in the pocket of big business. All this ‘electric cars only’ shinola is simply about obsoleting the existing stock of cars that are lasting entirely too long . Renewable energy is simply there to sell more product – not to generate more electricity.
Once you apply Cicero’s ‘Cui Bono?’ followed by Occam’s Razor, a rather different picture of government emerges.
All government is best understood to be a more or less thinly disguised, self-legalising protection racket.
Democracy simply means you have a choice of two Godfathers. Without having to resort to arms, which is bad for business.
Synopsis: California: “You can’t have a high-end computer because it uses too much electricity. However, you should turn in your gasoline fueled car for a electric one.”
…which you cannot charge because of all the brownouts and blackouts…
BINGO!
Now if we could upgrade the RAM in state government from 512K brainpower. But they just get dumber.
Somewhat lower than that… My first computer (of my very own, that is) was a TRS-80 Model III. 64K memory – of which 16K was read-only for the operating system.
It probably could run circles around the typical bureaucrat (who might have 64K memory, but with 63K read-only for the operating system).
Nah, they can’t get any dumber. But they could do stupid things faster, so more stupid things before their terms are up.
512k? you are off by several orders of magnitude too high
As far as Cal goes, the electricity grid there cannot support the level of EV’s the regulators there want to put on the road to replace ICE cars and trucks. But we all know that.
This push to make everything electric in Cal is hopelessly going to fail because the supply (generation stations at night) and the delivery system (power lines, substations, residential and commercial transformers) is probably only 1/5 of what is required. So trying save a few kilowatts with computer limits, when the shortfall is in multi-gigawatts range is the literal picture of pissing into a hurricane force wind.
The allowed EVs will eventually be downgraded, by regulation, to the power required to run an electric bicycle a moderate distance (to the grocery store and (hopefully) back.
And the first one that runs out of jiuce on the “freeways” will cause a traffic jam that will cause all the rest to run out of juice too.
Cue the diesel powered tow trucks!
Really a computer takes that much power? It’s not like they’re running an electric arc furnace for God’s sake!
Yes, the heat lamp that I use when I get out of the shower uses more energy than these high-end gaming machines.