Dell Unable To Fulfill Certain Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition To Six US States Due To New Power Regulations

Due to new power efficiency regulations, six states, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, are no longer to receive Dell's Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition and other Dell PC products, as well as other devices not manufactured by Dell that do not meet the required guidelines. This is after California began its Energy Consumption Tier 2 regulation that went into effect July 1, 2021.

Currently, anyone attempting to order certain Alienware Aurora R10 and R12 Ryzen edition gaming stations from the six states will see on Dell's website that the orders will not be fulfilled, reports website VideoCardz.

In an interview with The Register, a spokesperson from Dell states

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.

Now, there is a limit to the maximum kilowatt-hour usage per year for different product classifications which are separated by an expandability score, or ES. This expandability score will be determined by the number of devices and power consumption from devices such as graphics processing units and high-performing memory. Also, the limit of power each year can be increased by 'adders' depending on the type of device that is utilizing power, such as storage and other computer devices.

VideoCardz creates a great example, stating

[...] a discrete graphics card not attached to the CPU substrate with a bandwidth of 256 GB/s will increase kWh/yr by 39.63. The buffer bandwidth does not appear to be the best choice here though, because it will certainly affect Radeon RX 6000 cards more than NVIDIA RTX 30 GPUs. In the case of Aurora R10 desktop systems though, this unfortunately affects all GeForce systems as well.

It is unknown if other states will also have to, at some point, put regulations into effect due to the increased demand for products for gamers, content creators, or high-end workstations such as the Dell Alienware Aurora Ryzen Edition. It is speculated that we could see more states initiate this type of regulatory measure within the next decade.