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.
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. @ 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.
Now do automobiles, please.
If the powers that be believe that the use of fossil fuels is bad then they should ban all goods and services that make use of fossil fuels, not just high end gaming computers.
To be clear they did not ban computers per se. They made a requirement on its power usage that a somewhat higher end computer will not be able meet nor has no intention or interest in doing sort long term engineering iteration.
So now these particlar computers will not be sold into the California market. The other manufacturers will be able to increase their pricing. Will California lose some tax revenue? Perhaps. Is part of this to protect in-state computer manufacturers? Trade protection?
I know nothing about gaming …
A lot of tasks can be divided up and shared by multiple processors. example Why is it that for gaming, that strategy apparently doesn’t work?
Multi-threading is already a big part of any gaming software.
Are you sugesting gamers should hack cycles from other people’s computers?
I know nothing about gaming …
It’s entertainment. Like the movie industry, only bigger.
(and will continue to outstrip the movie industry, partly because of Hollywood Hubris and mainly because gaming has the ability to expand in any direction to fill the market desires. Movies are… well… movies. Change actors, change plot, but still an audio visual medium designed to be watched on a screen of some sort. Gaming is anything the market is willing to support, and with indy developers that market can be very small and still self supporting. Want to game on your phone while waiting for the bus? Gaming. Want to game on your tablet while sitting on bed? Gaming. Casual multiplayer you can play with your kids? Gaming. That is just the platforms. Also there are apparently console gamers but those people suck and should WASD up or stop crying their dumbed down port won’t run mods.
(This is just the platforms. The branches of the gaming tree are many. Want to play a First Person Shooter for online PvP? Yup. Online co-op in massive multiplayer? (No one asked for Fallout 76, Todd) Ummm… still yup.A recreation of the Game of Ur? yup. Text based dating simulator? Ummm… still yup. Hard core micromanagement within a hard science space empire simulator? Yup. Die alien scum in a different space empire simulator? Drive a truck across Europe in high resolution? Side scrolling platformers? Twin Stick top down shooters? Retro pixel graphics? Open world RPG set in pre-history, classical Greece, Medieval France, Nukaworld, a fantasy universe (with or without dragons) in either 1st or 3rd person? Yup. Pattern matching puzzles. Hidden object puzzles. Logic puzzles. Walking simulators. A game where you play as a dinosaur and walk around… sorta doing nothing… it was on sale okay, buyer remorse. A game where you play as a goat and shamelessly break things.
(Gaming can be and IS all those things to all those people. And console gamers. Screw those guys.)
So, enough with the backstory and to continue the movie v gaming comparison, when you pay to see a film done by one of the – nominally – top end studios do you expect the frame rate to be smooth with no old school ‘scratches’, in focus and synced correctly to the audio? Do you expect the audio to sound like you are in the room with the actors? Do you expect the locations selected to look amazing? Do you want the effects used in the movie to be smooth and in no way damaging to your suspension of disbelief? If you are watching in a cinema do you want to sit on seats that are not plastic hardbacks stolen from a kindergarten?
Do you believe a man can fly? Or you happy with seeing the strings?
In short, do you want a top quality experience?
Well so do gamers. It is their entertainment and they are willing to drop the dollars on it.
(did you spend a little bit extra on your home tv because you didn’t want to binge a tv series on anything smaller? Did you add third party speakers? (actually getting good home sound is REALLY worth the money. Good speakers age really well. Mine are 20 years old and still amazing, which is more than I can say for my 5 year old PC. )
Gaming is an industry that spills sideways. If you sit on your arse for a living and you are not planted on a high end gaming chair you are either on a tight budget or hate your body. I dropped about A$680 on my home chair and then, after a brief argument with work SHE (safety health environment) dropped the same again for one to use at work. And why shouldn’t I? Do your standard office chairs have arm rests with 4 degrees of freedom? Are standard office chairs even rated for what a typical male actually weighs these days? Muscle is dense, kids. You no longer need to be a fatty boombalatty to top 100kg.
Play like playing games. They want to play games. The gaming industry… for the most part… want to give the players games. Gaming is basically THE premier entertainment industry because what counts as ‘gaming’ is so flexible. You personally may not feel a desire to game and that is fine, but if you are the person who only believes entertainment comes from Hollywood or a streaming service then you are the one risking being alone in the corner with nothing to talk about at parties.
However, if you want to dip into table top gaming as well… Power to the Meeple! 😀
+1,000 Craig . You nailed it.
Marvelous post! And for the record, I would commit significant mayhem to be down to 100kg.
Most modern CPUs already come with multiple core’s. My current laptop has 8 cores in the CPU. To find out how may cores your computer has give your computer the 3-finger salute Ctrl-Alt-Del, the select the task manager.
Select the Performance tab.
At the bottom of the page select the “Open Resource Monitor” link.
From the Resource Monitor window select the CPU tab.
On the right side of the window you should be able to find a window for each of your cores. You may need to scroll down a little bit to find them.
Indeed. When I was re-doing a lot of of course material, I had a bunch of donated computers and built a render farm. It worked well.
I guess my question should have been, instead of building one monster PC, why don’t gamers build game farms. OK, that term is already used. Anyway, why don’t they hook a bunch of easily obtainable computers together to get a game supercomputer. I suspect the answer has something to do with communication.
Render farms are a vastly different beast than gaming systems, not the least of which is they can operate asynchronously and it doesn’t matter what order they finish in, as long as the controller assembles the results properly.
Game farms won’t work for a few reasons; one is that the software simply isn’t designed to function in that sort of a distributed environment. Another is that communication between physically separate computers (as you rightly noted) is going to be much slower than systems operating on the same motherboard, or even more so, on the same chip.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if someone designed a game to work on a “farm”, but I don’t expect we’ll ever see that.
Doh!
Yes this is problematic, however, we also have the Larry Pages of world now saying all houses and office buildings should be wired 12VDC.
Oh wait now they mean 48VDC.
So what about the server farms hosting all of Google, Apple, or the movie industry with am ever increasing need of and use of cgi. It seems to me that they would chase all these companies or at least those specific facilities out of California. Not a bad thing; well not for the rest of us.
Furthermore, these new legal requirement is NOT to decrease any amount CO2 nor is it about any sort of “sustainably” it is about reducing capacity their grid requires, lower the amount electricity in general, to give the false illusion of “renewables” work.
The fact is the term “renewable” is an oxymoron – it took that photon of energy about million years to get here to do work and be consumed and that photon is gone forever; never to be renewed; the same is true for wind energy, that mechanical energy was converted to electrical, still technically driven by solar energy. Also that wind had been destined to do other work, mostly evaporative cooling, to drive weather systems and rain. Is the drought we are now experiencing a consequence of too much wind energy being removed from atmosphere? Is the atmosphere any dryer or maybe not dryer but there is less mixing. Convection currents changed? Is anybody even looking at these aspects?
Yep that will work, given how Aussie 240v struggles to supply power to machine tools at the end of an extension cord, let along the 110v USA uses.
You need to get a better (thicker) extension cord. Copper shouldn’t lose very much energy in heat if it’s thick enough.
My pool heat pump won’t work with the existing cable installed to the shed it’s in. I use a mid-range (in terms of price) extension cable instead and it works fine.
“they are much more likely to assemble their own water cooled overclocked monstrosity in their mum’s basement”
HEY! I like my custom home-built liquid cooled overclocked computer and it’s NOT a Monster or a Monstrosity! It’s has very sensitive feelings and you should apologize. And I don’t live in a basement – my mother’s or anyone else’s.
On the positive side – this same basic system has lasted me over 10 years with only the occasional card, disk, or other replacement so it’s actually better on waste management then buying a new one every 3 or 4 years like most people do.
Someone starts dictating how much power my equipment can use and I am in REAL trouble. My lights literally dim when I switch on my vintage stereo system. It’s somewhere north of 1,000 watts but must be under 1,800 since it’s on a 15 Amp circuit – I have never actually measured it.
But like my 10 year old truck (that I love), it really boils down to “how often is it used”? I probably run the computer about 3 hours a day average. I run the stereo about 3 hours a week average, and the truck maybe 2,000 miles per year – so I likely come in way under a lot of the activists if you measure my “carbon footprint”.
If they try to limit my power I will just add more backup generator power and enough batteries to do as I please.
Just like my old axe I still use that I’ve only replaced the handle on 4 times and the head twice.
I’m sorry Robert. Now please ask your lovely computer to return my credit rating 😉
From what black market will you get the fuel for your backup generator?
I live in Texas…we drill too far down to make a water well and gas or oil comes gushing out! ;-D I could be the next Beverly Hillbilly except you can’t MAKE me move to California.
(BTW: My house is literally sits atop a patch of gas filled shale. They stopped buying up the mineral rights when gas prices plunged so I still own them.)
Imagine a PVC 1/2 inch pipe duct-taped together sticking out of my back yard and running into the generator… LOL (OK, I am being silly now, got to go to bed)
“I could be the next Beverly Hillbilly except you can’t MAKE me move to California”
That’s Ok, California is working on moving to you, or at least it’s former residents are and they want to make your state into a replica of the state they’re fleeing from.
“This place sucks, let’s move”
“This new place should be more like where we left”
Repeat.
Let’s see them enforce a maximum square footage of dwelling “per capita” – and no exceptions for movie stars, professional athletes, government trough feeders, billionaires or other “celebrities.” Then watch the tantrums begin!
only there’s never “no exceptions for movie stars, professional athletes, government trough feeders, billionaires or other “celebrities.”. Such laws are only ever for the “little people”.
Here’s a hint, when you turn it on for the first time and shout “It’s Alive!” you’ve built yourself a monstrosity 😉
“On the positive side – this same basic system has lasted me over 10 years with only the occasional card, disk, or other replacement”
I average about 10+ years per PC. Though I usually don’t replace things on them (other than occasionally needing a new mouse) but rather add to them (CD drives, sound cards, DVD burner, USB ports and the like – usually when the PC was a few years old and the add ons were the hot new tech),
I thought the CA plan was to move to RE, but it now seems that limiting consumption is the new plan. Obviously someone in power has worked out that RE doesn’t work. The stupidity here though is that people can still have their PCs sent to a red state and then get it trucked to CA, which will result in more CO2.
You haven’t been paying attention. Demand Side Management has been a feature of, especially CA, utilities for decades. Charging some people to pay other people to not consume electricity is the bureaucratic dodge of not building sufficient power generation facilities.
Not enough electricity to run a gaming rig or workstation, but plenty of energy to mandate EVs across the whole State.
We are going to get a gun ban passed to save our citizens!
P.S., you can pick up your free machetes at City Hall.
They want citizens to stop playing games on high end computers while at the same time also asking them them to put a “smart” meter on each home’s electricity input panel.
Words of dread: “Hi, I from the government and I’m here to help you.”
Government approved energy expenditure, like flying a private jet to climate conferences, or extensions of government power, are of course absolutely necessary and automatically exempt from any green energy restrictions.
Words of dread: “Hi, I from the government and I’m here to help you.”
As compared to Words of Dredd: “Littering? Six months cube time, Creep!”
Anyone want to talk comics when we finish the gaming thread? 😛
Midnight raids.
Smart meters transmitting high electrical consumption. Could be a gamer with a self built computer and no trace of purchase.
These morons don’t understand that unlike natgas, homemade electric connection is easy and quite safe if you aren’t a totally incompetent nutjob.
But some nutjobs don’t know they are nutjobs.
So we might end up with lot of unsafe, around-the-smart-meter electric wirings!
are much more likely to assemble their own water cooled overclocked monstrosity in their mum’s basement.
Sounds a bit narky there, Eric.
What’s the matter, Henry Cavill still stealing all the girls away from you?
Ha :-). I get offers, but I’m a good boy these days. Turns out a beer gut and grey hair are sexy. The place I live has an intriguing subculture of pagans.
I’m saved!
Damn, all I’ve got is the beer gut. And I didn’t even enjoy some beer to get it!
The local greenie morons pushed water restriction devices on taps here, to “save water”. Apparently the water needed saving. I’m in the “Wet Tropics” rain-forest zone! But the result of such deices imposed on our plumbing was my kitchen and bathroom taps both clogged up with a slimy bacterial mat in the warmer months and you got sick if you drank the water from the taps. I got repeated quite serious respiratory illnesses from it, was ill for months before I figured out what was making me constantly sick. I got pneumonia from this. Plus if I brushed my teeth with the bathroom tap water the same thing happened, the bacteria got in to the toothbrush, and you got a sore throat and painful sinus infection and cough. In the end I had to use boiled water to brush my teeth, so brushing my teeth was increasing my carbon-footprint! You dumb greenie fake geniuses! Good-for-nothing ignorant meddling stupid a-holes, the lot of you!
So I ordered regular unrestricted taps for my home again and it cost me hundreds of dollars to swap them to remedy this domestic health disaster the greenie clowns had imposed on us, where there was no problem at all prior to their interfering with the home water supply … to save water!
The moral of the story is don’t let any warm-hearted ignorant smiling greenie idiot anywhere near a vital utility service as they’ll wreck it and your life, every time, and the absolute fools in council and state government will allow them them to enact their “initiatives”.
These people are a national pest!
Water restriction devices are seriously dangerous to health and well-being. If you’re eating and exercising well, but getting sick often and wondering why it keeps happening, can’t identify why it is, check your plumbing fixtures. Make sure they flow freely and contain no constriction devices, nor any oily bacterial slime build ups anywhere within them. If you find devices that constrict water flow replace that component with one that flows freely ,with no filter in it. If it has a plastic filter or gauze, remove that part and throw it in the bin, and check the tap nozzles regularly for cleanliness. And your health will most likely quickly recover.
This bold “save the world” ideology is as dangerous, as it is ignorant and reckless.
The evolving green missing link in Green policies that are neither human nor animal nor vegetable nor mineral nor environmentally friendly.
And of course, all growth in electricity demand is due to data farms which is all about the internet, snd social media backing up trillions of pictures in clouds.
Without that the connected load and the requirement for reliable power would reduce
The current young generation is destroying the climate!!!!
Oh dear
This one, that I used to maintain in the Navy in the 70’s, didn’t put out much heat at all.
Fully mechanical other than a constant speed motor running for the time input.
There were heated words when my knee touched the 300VDC motor supply
During a display of the new Flir visible and IR airborne camera.the chopper was on the airport tarmac. The operator scanned some homes a couple of miles away the other side of the strip, then pointed to the screen where a home had rather hot mains wires from the street. Diagnosis was meth lab or pot growing or gaming computer.
Isn’t modern surveillance capability impressive? All the above types of perps were goners in quick time. Geoff S
…and the geek shall inherit the Earth…
Gatthew 5:5
Turns out Mom’s basement makes a passable bomb shelter.
It’s not just gamers. Anyone engaged in CAD work would need a high end computer. So this effectively helps make California less competitive.
I’ve read that a lot of movie making companies are leaving California. This could be one of the reasons. Creating high end graphics takes a lot of computer power.
As does any reliance whatsoever on “green” (NOT) energy scams.
figure they’ll just order via mates elsewhere then reship anyway
cali eu uk all got the same braindead regs re people having freedom to own n run what they want
like the mentioned low usefullness dishwashers in Usa and the ban on vacuum cleaners over 2000watts in uk
Gamers trying to assemble their own kit lately are facing a shortage of components and high prices…
China need the chips for all their new missile control systems…
Apple bringing in the M1 chip will change all this. The chip is extremely energy efficient compared to existing Intel and AMD processors.
IMO, all climate modelers should have their energy-intensive computers taken away until they have learned how to use them responsibly. (And yes, I am well aware of the apparent logical contradiction in that statement. It’s a classic).
@ Eric Worrall Dell owns Alienware which was once a fantastic gaming pc builder, now not so much.
I’m sure someone would be willing to order a verboten computer for the poor souls who live in occupied America and ship it to them for a small additional fee.
I am not going through all these comments to see if this has been mentioned,but JayzTwoCents has covered this
Oh, I guess I should have gone through all the comments. I think this article should have been posted as RIDICULAE and not Climate Politics
“Starved of High End Computers”?!? Give me a f’ing break! “Starved”?!? Poor, poor things. We can’t be super exaggerators like them and have credibility. People are starving in the 3rd world because of green energy regulations/delusions. No one in California’s imaginary community is being “starved”. “Pot calling the kettle black”
Doesn’t Telsa market their cars with different kWh batteries? California should ban the higher performance batteries because no one needs their car to accelerate from 0-60 in three seconds, right? High performance gaming computers vs. high performance cars: what’s the difference? My guess is that Tesla buyers have an order of magnitude more clout with politicians who put the regulations in place.
“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.”
Yes. It can turn out badly for people who go out of their way to insult high-end computer geeks. I wouldn’t do it.
I’m no gamer…I’m an engineer and PhD student. I’ve been looking at desktops that can handle my research demands computationally and graphically. I’ve seen those warnings not just from Dell but elsewhere (e.g., sellers through Amazon).
What if you have your own solar panels?
The basic theme of this article is illusion and delusion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5fc5ZX6Kzk US States Banning Gaming PCs?? Here’s what’s REALLY going on…
I am a retired EE, Over the decades I have specked computers from 8 bit to 64bit.
Some I purchased and some I build for various tasks.
I am subscribed to JayzTwoCents Youtube channel. I would expect anyone who views the video and is not a Science Engineering and Technology imbecile (SETI), would also understand suggesting the actions of Dell in not shipping some computer model suggests no restrictions on the availability of Gaming computers anywhere. The regulation IMHO stupid and will add compliance costs (time to show item compliance analysis) to all computers and not improve computer efficiency at all.