High Expandability Computers and the California Energy Commission's (CEC) New Regulations

In an effort to reduce power consumption and waste, the CEC has implemented new regulations for high expandability computers, also known as gaming computers. These systems are exempt from certain energy efficiency standards due to their high power requirements. To qualify as a high expandability computer, a system must meet two specific criteria: it must have a 600 watt or greater 80 Plus Gold power supply and a discrete graphics card that meets a minimum memory bandwidth requirement of 600 GB/s.

The irony lies in the fact that these systems are designed to be highly powerful and energy-intensive, yet they are exempt from the regulations. This has led some to wonder why the CEC would target gaming computers specifically, as they often consume more power than other types of computers. However, it's worth noting that gaming computers typically have high-performance components that require a lot of power to operate.

One company that is taking advantage of this exemption is Dell. In an effort to comply with the new regulations, Dell has created a certified SKU for their systems that meet the CEC's standards. This means that customers can purchase these systems without worrying about them being exempt from the regulations. However, if a system is not certified, it will not be allowed to be shipped to California.

The exemption process can be confusing, and it's not always clear who is affected by the new regulations. For individuals who build their own computers, this does not affect them directly unless they start regulating parts individually, which seems unlikely. However, for those who purchase pre-built systems, the situation is more complex.

To avoid any issues, customers can either hope that the company will update their website to reflect whether a system meets the CEC's standards or have a friend in Arizona ship the computer on their behalf. This workaround highlights the challenges of navigating the exemption process and the need for clear communication from manufacturers and regulatory bodies.

It's worth noting that some people may be more guilty of contributing to power consumption than they realize. The tendency to leave computers on idle for extended periods can lead to significant energy waste. However, this is not a fault of the power utility or the CEC, but rather a behavior that consumers need to adopt in order to reduce their carbon footprint.

The new regulations may also have implications for other types of products, such as monitors, which are expected to be affected by the CEC's rules starting in December. However, for now, high expandability computers remain exempt from the energy efficiency standards, and customers can continue to purchase these systems without worrying about them being targeted by the CEC.

Ultimately, the exemption process is complex, and it requires a good understanding of the regulations and how they apply to different products. While some consumers may be affected by the new rules, others will not be impacted directly. As the situation evolves, it's essential for manufacturers, regulatory bodies, and consumers to work together to ensure that these regulations are enforced fairly and effectively.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys js2sense here uh if there's ever been a time that I'm gonna beg you to actually watch the entire video it's now because we're going to talk about what people are freaking out about right now which is California's Title 20 and the supposed ban on gaming computers being sold in the state of California or the state of California Washington Oregon Vermont and Hawaii also known as the West Coast Coalition plus the weird Black Sheep somewhere out there in New England but we actually spent some time on this video trying to get some information and we waited until we could get all the facts so that you guys can actually be informed on what's really going on here I think you guys might be surprised but we also wanted to make sure that we this wasn't some clickbaity video that a lot of people were really trying to cash in on right now uh giving you guys actual facts so keep that in mind all right so obviously we're talking about the CEC uh our California energy commission Title 20 tier 2 standards for computers and people already are like what the hell that's a lot of big words we've spent more time actually trying to remove all the lawyers slash Public Utilities Commission slash jargon out of these documents to try and get to the actual route of what's going on here we also used Intel's document because Intel has actually been really involved in this and you'll understand why when you understand the regulations so first and foremost this is not new this isn't new at all this is something that actually went into a planned effect back in 2016. what do I mean by planned effect anytime a Utilities Commission or legislature or any sort of law goes into effect there is a period of time at which companies or those affected by said laws have time to uh understand the compliance regulations and fall within those regulations or just choose to be outside of those regulations and not do business in the state so which follow this now if we're talking about California here some of you might be like why the heck are we also talking about Washington Oregon Vermont and Hawaii well that's because I mentioned at the start of this video kind of kind of saltly saltly saltedly the West Coast Coalition anything California does Oregon and Washington are guaranteed to follow suit Hawaii as well Vermont I'm really not sure why Vermont I think that's like the hey guys can I play two kind of a legislature thing moving forward here Title 20 is something that went into effect our planned effect back in 2016. there's different tiers there's different items affected within Title 20 and as time moves on they basically had a year to prepare for every single one of these categories and then when each tier went into effect and then everyone's kind of freaking out and talking about this now because tier two which is the final tier essentially when it comes to desktop computers and then later in December of this year they're moving on to monitors uh basically went into effect July of this year so just now and people noticed on the Dell website that it says you cannot ship those items to the states that I mentioned and that's because those particular computers from Dell do not correspond with the regulations that have been put in place in these five states so what are those regulations here and this is the part that a lot of people are freaking out because all they're seeing is that it's an Alienware from Dell that can't be sent to California so automatically the articles that you're seeing seeing the headlines the attention grabbing headlines the Reddit threads the YouTube videos that are going out there are all specifically engineered in my opinion to get the gamer riled up because I don't believe the authors actually understand necessarily what's happening here now I haven't read all of the Articles so I hope that someone out there is actually putting out some reliable information to get you guys kind of educated as to what's happening here but specifically it says the title 20 standards are cost effective technically feasible and limit the amount of electricity computers and monitors are allowed to consume when not in active mode that's the first thing most people are not talking about here they are targeting the different states of idol and sleep not your computer being on and doing something they are specifically targeting uh computers that are left to go to sleep and then you've got the 15-minute sleep period where it wakes back up quickly and then you got the deeper sleep or hibernate mode and the amount of power that these computers consume when they're on and not active the standard set targets for energy consumed in the four non-active modes based on the computer's expandability score so that's another thing that people aren't talking about here they are taken into effect the expandability of a computer can you put a graphics card in it how much RAM does it have in there what kind of RAM is in there all of these things get you an additional allowance in terms of kilowatt hour consumption there's a big old formula Intel has it on their website I'm I'm not going to bore you guys with that type of stuff I want to give you guys the information to understand what's happening here not so much the calculation method involved we're going to do very high level discussion here so that people can understand that but let's say for instance we're talking about a mini ITX system with one PCI 16x slot 1 nvme drive and two memory module slots that system would actually be allowed less consumption or kilowatt hours per year than say a threaded per system that has eight memory modules or seven full length 16x PCI Express slots so or even four nvme slots all of those items that can potentially be utilized are taken into the account when it comes to the expandability score which means higher watts and kilowatt hours are available to that system under this regulatory outline here which already is a little backwards from when everyone's thinking you would think the smaller system would be less regulated because the the possibility of it using power is less because you can't hook things up to it it's actually the opposite the more expandability you have in your system the more power you're allowed to it which means the smaller ITX rigs actually are the strictest regulated so here are the allowances for additional energy use based on the identity education and the classification according to the CEC add-in cards which in itself is kind of vague that's like saying if you could plug it in but add in cards additional hard disks obviously ssds and spinning drives graphics cards obviously probably the biggest Glidden in your system you'll know the truth high bandwidth secure system memory so they specifically regulate memory based off its bandwidth because that's the easiest way to determine what kind of memory it is without just saying DDR3 ddr4 et cetera so it's just about its memory bandwidth that's the the factor they use ethernet capability integrated display refresh rates above 300 Hertz and monitors and that's a whole separate discussion there system memory video surveillance cards you know those those cards that have a bunch of the little mini coaxials that you plug in security cameras to and then wired ethernet or Fiber cards so each one of these things if they are in your system pre-built remember we're talking pre-builts will actually increase the kilowatt hour limit that you're allowed to have in a non-active state per year in my viewers most probably closely related category is going to be sis or gaming sis origin PC Digital Storm BLD Corsair whoever's selling gaming systems is probably who you're you're considering most Alienware obviously and I however you feel about Alienware it's still an SI you are only allowed 75 kilowatt hours per year in the crazy calculation that Intel well Intel uses calculation based off of the CEC and the recommend in their regular regulations remember we're talking about non-active hours here it could only consume a maximum of 75 kilowatt hours per year now if you have a system that let's say for instance has a RTX 3090 in it that adds 50 kilowatt hours per year budget that means the small the little small form factor pre-built is more heavily regulated and held to a tighter standard than a big system that could actually use a lot of power it's kind of dumb but it makes sense because there's not such thing as a one-size-fits-all category of computer now there are systems here that are already considered CEC exempt as of 2018. remember this is a multi-year rollout type of Regulation here small scale servers which is like we have here in the studio that we built with our unread and our raid and all that sort of stuff High expandability computers which we'll talk about in a second what those are mobile workstations and workstation as the as defined by CEC standard now they have to meet the following requirements to be considered Tec exempt so there's three major requirements here and then they have some bullet points underneath each one so the power supply efficiency obviously power supply plays a huge role on the efficiency of the system that's got the 80 plus gold IPS which is PFC 020 0.9 or are at 50 load and then there's a level 60 OE EPS efficiency requirement I have no idea what that is we didn't bother looking it up it's obviously part of the power supply spec but energy efficient ethernet functionality I've never in my life paid attention to how much power the ethernet plugged into a system that's off could be powering and then the power management settings themselves the display has to turn off within 15 minutes of inactivity and have you ever noticed in Windows that's a default this is part of this right here system sleep or off within 30 minutes of inactivity which is again the default setting in Windows it says no small sales small sales Carvers scurvy small scale servers and rack mounted workstations are not required to meet the power management requirements if the server goes to sleep it's not serving anything uh High expandability computers now that's obviously in this now High Expendable computers is gaming computers that's essentially what that is to be a high expandability computer that falls within this exempt category must meet the two following requirements it must have a 600 watt or greater 80 plus gold power supply and not or and a graphics card a discrete graphics card that is 600 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth or greater now that essentially equates to a 2080 TI equivalent uh you can do the math you can go and look at all the all the gpus and they'll list what their what their bandwidth is uh and it must have a discrete graphics card that meets that requirement so the irony here is that they're actually trying to save power the lower end gaming systems that do not meet these requirements because they don't have a high-end graphics card and they don't have a high capacity power supply don't meet these requirements to be exempt Therefore your high power usage gaming systems are exempt so in fact when it comes to the way the sis are expecting all of this out and the fact that they can get uh certified Dell that screenshot everyone's kind of freaking out about now uh if you go in there and try to take that computer that is not California compliant that says they that the 11 to 400 F and has the 1650 super in there if you go in there and then add a 600 watt gold power supply and a 3080 you still can't ship it so what that means is that Dell has actually taken that certified SKU because remember there's one computer there that you can send to California and everyone's like what's that one they're the same parts of the same Parts myself included just looked at that for face value and said why can that one be sent to California it's because Dell actually got that particular SKU and that system certified in the state of California for CEC yes 50 state legal computer things I never thought I would say again all right so what this means to the two different categories of viewers I have right now if you're a build your own type this doesn't affect you in any way unless they start trying to regulate Parts individually which I don't see how they could actually enforce or do but they could just stop bringing the parts in hope we don't get there this doesn't affect you in any way you're more affected obviously by the price of Parts than anything happening here for the person that doesn't build their own computer and wants to buy one you have a couple of options here yes you hope that the company is actually speccing out their build it on the website we click boxes that will actually be smart enough to know like this is California legal when it comes to uh the SI you just have to hope they're smart enough to update their database to know if the criteria is met for the exemption here that yes they'll ship it to the state or you can do what a lot of people do when it comes to park car parts just have a friend in Arizona you know bounce ship it for you I mean there is that it sucks but you know a lot of people do it they're not targeting Gamers specifically they're targeting gluttons and what I mean by gluttons is and I'm guilty of this I think all three of us in this room and probably thousands of you watching right now are completely guilty of walking away from your computer and leaving it on that is what led to all of this if you're also like me and you like to turn off a lot of the power saving modes and sleep mode then we're definitely a fault for all this but you can't necessarily fault the power utility or the the Public Utilities Commission in the CEC for wanting to reduce this type of waste I hope the way we explain the exemptions um the way the expandability score Works who's actually being regulated here who's being targeted uh puts a lot of you at ease because really at the end of the day unless you were going to buy an SI system which I think a lot of sis right now are still shipping to California they haven't stopped this doesn't really affect you right now monitors might that's how that's something coming December of this year and I'm not going to even talk about monitors because you wouldn't even believe what we had to go through to dig up this level of information most of the people that are talking about this are just regurgitating and repeating uh old 2016 La time story that has no information in it and by the way if you go to the cec's website and you actually drop go through the drop downs to find this information and you click desktop computers it says 404 not found so the commission that is in charge of this can't even keep their website up to date I'm just going to end it there let that sink inhey guys js2sense here uh if there's ever been a time that I'm gonna beg you to actually watch the entire video it's now because we're going to talk about what people are freaking out about right now which is California's Title 20 and the supposed ban on gaming computers being sold in the state of California or the state of California Washington Oregon Vermont and Hawaii also known as the West Coast Coalition plus the weird Black Sheep somewhere out there in New England but we actually spent some time on this video trying to get some information and we waited until we could get all the facts so that you guys can actually be informed on what's really going on here I think you guys might be surprised but we also wanted to make sure that we this wasn't some clickbaity video that a lot of people were really trying to cash in on right now uh giving you guys actual facts so keep that in mind all right so obviously we're talking about the CEC uh our California energy commission Title 20 tier 2 standards for computers and people already are like what the hell that's a lot of big words we've spent more time actually trying to remove all the lawyers slash Public Utilities Commission slash jargon out of these documents to try and get to the actual route of what's going on here we also used Intel's document because Intel has actually been really involved in this and you'll understand why when you understand the regulations so first and foremost this is not new this isn't new at all this is something that actually went into a planned effect back in 2016. what do I mean by planned effect anytime a Utilities Commission or legislature or any sort of law goes into effect there is a period of time at which companies or those affected by said laws have time to uh understand the compliance regulations and fall within those regulations or just choose to be outside of those regulations and not do business in the state so which follow this now if we're talking about California here some of you might be like why the heck are we also talking about Washington Oregon Vermont and Hawaii well that's because I mentioned at the start of this video kind of kind of saltly saltly saltedly the West Coast Coalition anything California does Oregon and Washington are guaranteed to follow suit Hawaii as well Vermont I'm really not sure why Vermont I think that's like the hey guys can I play two kind of a legislature thing moving forward here Title 20 is something that went into effect our planned effect back in 2016. there's different tiers there's different items affected within Title 20 and as time moves on they basically had a year to prepare for every single one of these categories and then when each tier went into effect and then everyone's kind of freaking out and talking about this now because tier two which is the final tier essentially when it comes to desktop computers and then later in December of this year they're moving on to monitors uh basically went into effect July of this year so just now and people noticed on the Dell website that it says you cannot ship those items to the states that I mentioned and that's because those particular computers from Dell do not correspond with the regulations that have been put in place in these five states so what are those regulations here and this is the part that a lot of people are freaking out because all they're seeing is that it's an Alienware from Dell that can't be sent to California so automatically the articles that you're seeing seeing the headlines the attention grabbing headlines the Reddit threads the YouTube videos that are going out there are all specifically engineered in my opinion to get the gamer riled up because I don't believe the authors actually understand necessarily what's happening here now I haven't read all of the Articles so I hope that someone out there is actually putting out some reliable information to get you guys kind of educated as to what's happening here but specifically it says the title 20 standards are cost effective technically feasible and limit the amount of electricity computers and monitors are allowed to consume when not in active mode that's the first thing most people are not talking about here they are targeting the different states of idol and sleep not your computer being on and doing something they are specifically targeting uh computers that are left to go to sleep and then you've got the 15-minute sleep period where it wakes back up quickly and then you got the deeper sleep or hibernate mode and the amount of power that these computers consume when they're on and not active the standard set targets for energy consumed in the four non-active modes based on the computer's expandability score so that's another thing that people aren't talking about here they are taken into effect the expandability of a computer can you put a graphics card in it how much RAM does it have in there what kind of RAM is in there all of these things get you an additional allowance in terms of kilowatt hour consumption there's a big old formula Intel has it on their website I'm I'm not going to bore you guys with that type of stuff I want to give you guys the information to understand what's happening here not so much the calculation method involved we're going to do very high level discussion here so that people can understand that but let's say for instance we're talking about a mini ITX system with one PCI 16x slot 1 nvme drive and two memory module slots that system would actually be allowed less consumption or kilowatt hours per year than say a threaded per system that has eight memory modules or seven full length 16x PCI Express slots so or even four nvme slots all of those items that can potentially be utilized are taken into the account when it comes to the expandability score which means higher watts and kilowatt hours are available to that system under this regulatory outline here which already is a little backwards from when everyone's thinking you would think the smaller system would be less regulated because the the possibility of it using power is less because you can't hook things up to it it's actually the opposite the more expandability you have in your system the more power you're allowed to it which means the smaller ITX rigs actually are the strictest regulated so here are the allowances for additional energy use based on the identity education and the classification according to the CEC add-in cards which in itself is kind of vague that's like saying if you could plug it in but add in cards additional hard disks obviously ssds and spinning drives graphics cards obviously probably the biggest Glidden in your system you'll know the truth high bandwidth secure system memory so they specifically regulate memory based off its bandwidth because that's the easiest way to determine what kind of memory it is without just saying DDR3 ddr4 et cetera so it's just about its memory bandwidth that's the the factor they use ethernet capability integrated display refresh rates above 300 Hertz and monitors and that's a whole separate discussion there system memory video surveillance cards you know those those cards that have a bunch of the little mini coaxials that you plug in security cameras to and then wired ethernet or Fiber cards so each one of these things if they are in your system pre-built remember we're talking pre-builts will actually increase the kilowatt hour limit that you're allowed to have in a non-active state per year in my viewers most probably closely related category is going to be sis or gaming sis origin PC Digital Storm BLD Corsair whoever's selling gaming systems is probably who you're you're considering most Alienware obviously and I however you feel about Alienware it's still an SI you are only allowed 75 kilowatt hours per year in the crazy calculation that Intel well Intel uses calculation based off of the CEC and the recommend in their regular regulations remember we're talking about non-active hours here it could only consume a maximum of 75 kilowatt hours per year now if you have a system that let's say for instance has a RTX 3090 in it that adds 50 kilowatt hours per year budget that means the small the little small form factor pre-built is more heavily regulated and held to a tighter standard than a big system that could actually use a lot of power it's kind of dumb but it makes sense because there's not such thing as a one-size-fits-all category of computer now there are systems here that are already considered CEC exempt as of 2018. remember this is a multi-year rollout type of Regulation here small scale servers which is like we have here in the studio that we built with our unread and our raid and all that sort of stuff High expandability computers which we'll talk about in a second what those are mobile workstations and workstation as the as defined by CEC standard now they have to meet the following requirements to be considered Tec exempt so there's three major requirements here and then they have some bullet points underneath each one so the power supply efficiency obviously power supply plays a huge role on the efficiency of the system that's got the 80 plus gold IPS which is PFC 020 0.9 or are at 50 load and then there's a level 60 OE EPS efficiency requirement I have no idea what that is we didn't bother looking it up it's obviously part of the power supply spec but energy efficient ethernet functionality I've never in my life paid attention to how much power the ethernet plugged into a system that's off could be powering and then the power management settings themselves the display has to turn off within 15 minutes of inactivity and have you ever noticed in Windows that's a default this is part of this right here system sleep or off within 30 minutes of inactivity which is again the default setting in Windows it says no small sales small sales Carvers scurvy small scale servers and rack mounted workstations are not required to meet the power management requirements if the server goes to sleep it's not serving anything uh High expandability computers now that's obviously in this now High Expendable computers is gaming computers that's essentially what that is to be a high expandability computer that falls within this exempt category must meet the two following requirements it must have a 600 watt or greater 80 plus gold power supply and not or and a graphics card a discrete graphics card that is 600 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth or greater now that essentially equates to a 2080 TI equivalent uh you can do the math you can go and look at all the all the gpus and they'll list what their what their bandwidth is uh and it must have a discrete graphics card that meets that requirement so the irony here is that they're actually trying to save power the lower end gaming systems that do not meet these requirements because they don't have a high-end graphics card and they don't have a high capacity power supply don't meet these requirements to be exempt Therefore your high power usage gaming systems are exempt so in fact when it comes to the way the sis are expecting all of this out and the fact that they can get uh certified Dell that screenshot everyone's kind of freaking out about now uh if you go in there and try to take that computer that is not California compliant that says they that the 11 to 400 F and has the 1650 super in there if you go in there and then add a 600 watt gold power supply and a 3080 you still can't ship it so what that means is that Dell has actually taken that certified SKU because remember there's one computer there that you can send to California and everyone's like what's that one they're the same parts of the same Parts myself included just looked at that for face value and said why can that one be sent to California it's because Dell actually got that particular SKU and that system certified in the state of California for CEC yes 50 state legal computer things I never thought I would say again all right so what this means to the two different categories of viewers I have right now if you're a build your own type this doesn't affect you in any way unless they start trying to regulate Parts individually which I don't see how they could actually enforce or do but they could just stop bringing the parts in hope we don't get there this doesn't affect you in any way you're more affected obviously by the price of Parts than anything happening here for the person that doesn't build their own computer and wants to buy one you have a couple of options here yes you hope that the company is actually speccing out their build it on the website we click boxes that will actually be smart enough to know like this is California legal when it comes to uh the SI you just have to hope they're smart enough to update their database to know if the criteria is met for the exemption here that yes they'll ship it to the state or you can do what a lot of people do when it comes to park car parts just have a friend in Arizona you know bounce ship it for you I mean there is that it sucks but you know a lot of people do it they're not targeting Gamers specifically they're targeting gluttons and what I mean by gluttons is and I'm guilty of this I think all three of us in this room and probably thousands of you watching right now are completely guilty of walking away from your computer and leaving it on that is what led to all of this if you're also like me and you like to turn off a lot of the power saving modes and sleep mode then we're definitely a fault for all this but you can't necessarily fault the power utility or the the Public Utilities Commission in the CEC for wanting to reduce this type of waste I hope the way we explain the exemptions um the way the expandability score Works who's actually being regulated here who's being targeted uh puts a lot of you at ease because really at the end of the day unless you were going to buy an SI system which I think a lot of sis right now are still shipping to California they haven't stopped this doesn't really affect you right now monitors might that's how that's something coming December of this year and I'm not going to even talk about monitors because you wouldn't even believe what we had to go through to dig up this level of information most of the people that are talking about this are just regurgitating and repeating uh old 2016 La time story that has no information in it and by the way if you go to the cec's website and you actually drop go through the drop downs to find this information and you click desktop computers it says 404 not found so the commission that is in charge of this can't even keep their website up to date I'm just going to end it there let that sink in\n"