[deleted]
High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States
11–20 of 111 posts
Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States
#12Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27954946
The top comment explains why this is probably a good thing.
Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States
#13All dark blue states. California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.
Pointless vote-grabbing bills are pushed to get headlines and signal the lawmakers virtuosity. Makes me think of the plastic bag "tax" in LA.
Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States
#14Yeah. PCs which consume high power when in idle state.
How is that determined?
Few PCs draw much power when idle. A dual-monitor flat screen setup probably draws more than most idle computers (but yet not in power saving state).
Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States
#15At a minimum, at least this is ideologically consistent with wanting to ban bitcoin, since both consume approximately the same order of magnitude of energy.
Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States
#16I fail to see how a progressive residential energy tax wouldn’t have been the better option but I’m super jacked to see progress being made, even if it is a tad misguided.
Then people will just buy more gasoline cars.
Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States
#17Are there any restrictions on the purchase of individual computer parts, or restrictions on assembling those parts for a fee? What about the import of those parts, or a whole high-end gaming PC from out of state, post sale?
Would leaving the state explicitly to purchase a high powered gaming PC be illegal? A federal crime?
This just feels nominal and designed to send a message, but I genuinely don't understand that message. Gaming is bad because it hurts the environment? That's not right...
So many questions, and I'm suspecting there are fewer answers.
Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States
#18Having dived deeper, this is under the tier 1 requirements under California's energy efficiency limits. Which the California Energy Commission (CEC) noted to adopt tighter appliance energy standards.
However from December 2021, "computers with high-speed networking capability, multi-screen notebooks, notebooks with cyclical behavior, and monitors with high refresh rates" will be covered by the rules" under tier 2 requirements.
That is ridiculous.
Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States
#19Yeah. PCs which consume high power when in idle state.
Still a very annoying law because it prevents you from enabling stuff like wake-on-lan on modern PCs. You have to turn off all the power compliance toggles in the BIOS or it will power off the NIC and break a bunch of other stuff. If the vendor doesn't let you disable compliance mode, you're SoL.
Idle PCs consume roughly 0% of the country's energy. If they wanna reduce it anyway, they should put an energy star sticker on computers so people can save money with more efficient machines.
Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States
#20Not really. The regulations also hit me as relatively reasonable, seemingly having exemptions for highly expandable devices, and largely being concerned with idle energy usage. Furthermore, this was known a long time in advance and is the reasoning for the ATX12VO standard that appeared in 2019.