Dell Cannot Ship Alienware Aurora R10/R12 System to California and 5 Other States

If you were looking to pick up an Alienware Aurora R10/R12 system and live in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, or Washington you are out of luck as Dell cannot ship specific systems to these states. This is because of new energy efficiency regulations which came into effect on July 1st in those states. These new regulations limit the maximum kilowatt-hour usage of select devices.

dell power 1

Looking at select Alienware Aurora systems with both Intel and AMD processors as well as NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards you’ll see a message on the bottom of the screen that reads “This products calling be shipped to the states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, or Washington due to power consumption regulations adopted by those states. Any orders placed that are bound for those states will be cancelled.”

It is pretty interesting as many of these systems are pretty low-spec including on with an Intel Core i7-11700F and RTX 3060 Ti. The new standards that these states are implementing are largely based off the Energy Star Computer Program which defines power consumption of PCs.

dell power 3

According to the new regulations in these states high-end desktops can consume no more than 75 kWhr/year. Now if it is equipped with a discrete graphics card or some other adder (from the ES list) its maximum power consumption can be increased based on the bandwidth of the graphics cards onboard memory. Apparently these Alienware Aurora systems do not comply with these new requirements.

These regulations do not apply to DIY PCs (at least not yet), so if you plan on building your own PC you won’t have to worry about these regulations. You can expect PC makers do offer systems specific to these requirements or even systems without specific components (to be installed by the end-user) which would also comply with these regulations.

Via Tom’s Hardware

About Author