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.
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).
@ur momisugly 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”