NEW ENERGY LAW HITS ALIENWARE

DELL ISSUES WARNING

NEW LAWS ON ENERGY EFFICIENCY have come into effect in California and five other States. The California Energy Commission Tier II implementation defines a mandatory energy consumption for desktop systems, depending on the PC’s memory, GPU, extra drives, and so on. Warnings appeared on Dell’s website under selected Alienware systems, saying they could no longer be shipped to six States. Closer inspection of the rules reveals they only apply to a PC when it idles, not under load, and the idea is to limit pointless power consumption, not performance. Despite having five years’ notice, some configurations of Alienware’s Aurora R10, and R12 systems managed to flunk the test, but as no other system builder had any problems, it seems our rigs are safe.