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High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States

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Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States

#61

Post by spauka »

NavinF wrote: post #19
garyfirestorm wrote: post #2

Yeah. 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 sticke…

That is not accurate - take a look at Page 9 of the product compliance datasheet: https://downloads.dell.com/rdoc/dell%20alienware%20ryzen%20e...

WOL and similar features do not change power consumption and this is not where the listed PC's fail. They fail on idle/standby power consumption and to be clear - there is NO reason they have to. Similar spec'd PC's can be purchased that meet these requirements.

Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States

#62

Post by therouwboat »

chroem- wrote: post #15

At a minimum, at least this is ideologically consistent with wanting to ban bitcoin, since both consume approximately the same order of magnitude of energy.

>after July 1, 2021, the kWh per year limit becomes 50, 60, and 75.

RTX 3080 consumes 250W when mining, so it would hit those limits in 10 days?

Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States

#64

Post by Dylan16807 »

mlindner wrote: post #50
onion2k wrote: post #12

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27954946 The top comment explains why this is probably a good thing.

And the response explains why that comment is wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27957381

The exact math was off, but high end gaming PCs are still not being banned.

Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States

#65

Post by hellotomyrars »

colordrops wrote: post #29
frostburg wrote: post #9

In this specific instance the consumer is being done a favor by being prevented from buying terrible prebuilts, but the law is absurd.

What's wrong with the prebuilts? Price vs performance?

You pay more for less than if you did it yourself and it isn't hard to find where they've cut corners to lower their costs.

But also critically the people buying pre-builts are obviously not interested in doing it themselves. That is why the market exists, right? So like its fun for more serious people to dunk on them in Youtube videos or whatever but I think its something pretty overblown.

Also if you're really willing to spend some money, there are plenty of Boutique vendors (Falcon Northwest) that will gladly sell you a capable and well-built computer.

Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States

#66

Post by pedroma »

mlindner wrote: post #56
pedroma wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like gun laws. As long as the grip on the gun is shaped in a certain way, it's no longer an illegal assault rifle.

You mean "assault weapon". The laws invent the category of "assault weapon" and then define it arbitrarily to ban it. "assault rifle" is something completely different and actually has a definition, but is also something that's illegal for sale anywhere in the US (if newly produced). Assault rifles are defined by having selective fire between semi-auto and fully-automatic. (These weapons are still sold in the US, but…

Considering many assault weapons are rifles and many assault rifles are assault weapons, please excuse my imprecise language.

Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States

#67

Post by SilverRed »

nightski wrote: post #36
ReaLNero wrote: post #3

To reduce emissions, they've started targeting the gaming industry? The meat industry emits orders of magnitude more pollution (even relative to the number of users of each)! Obviously, politicians would lose favor for targeting the meat industry, and thus have avoided fixing measures which would actually reduce emissions. > They list consoles with taking a bulk of the emissions at 66%, and desktop computers at 31%.…

Not to mention meat is only 3% of emissions in the U.S. (of which the U.S. is the largest producer of emissions on a per capita basis). So if these gaming computers are a few orders of magnitude less than that (at idle speeds) it shows how ridiculous this is. Not to mention that these systems will just be shipped to the other 44 states (they aren't exactly dismantling them) so it's really just shuffling the problem e…

>it shows how ridiculous this is

Does it? If the other comment is to be believed, this law bans high end PCs which use more than 11W while in sleep mode. This is an absurd amount of power to draw. Most devices use less than 1W in sleep mode. Using so much power shows extremely inefficient design.

If this law can cause companies to fix their buggy firmware this could result in a massive power savings with virtually no effect to consumers since these devices never should have been using so much power anyway.

Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States

#68

Post by Dylan16807 »

pedroma wrote: post #54
onion2k wrote: post #12

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27954946 The top comment explains why this is probably a good thing.

Sounds like gun laws. As long as the grip on the gun is shaped in a certain way, it's no longer an illegal assault rifle.

You make it sound like the guns are using loopholes, but it's more that a lot of these bans are against a bunch of random miscellaneous attributes of the gun and don't make sense to begin with.

Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States

#69

Post by SilverRed »

tapland wrote: post #14
garyfirestorm wrote: post #2

Yeah. 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).

This is for prebuilt machines. Seems pretty easy to test. Turn the thing on, put it in sleep mode, then record the power draw from the PC PSU. Monitors are not included.

Re: High-End Gaming PCs Banned in Six US States

#70

Post by SilverRed »

NavinF wrote: post #19
garyfirestorm wrote: post #2

Yeah. 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 sticke…

Why can you not use wake on lan? Apple devices still have full networking capabilities while using less than 1w. It doesn't take over 11w to wake on lan unless the firmware is insanely inefficient.

This law will get mobo vendors to fix their products causing power savings world wide.

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