Dell won’t be shipping Alienware Aurora PCs to six US states

Those living in the states of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington will not be able to order specific Alienware Aurora PCs and will have their orders canceled. Due to the implementation of the California Energy Commission (CEC) Tier 2 regulations, the aforementioned states will now limit the maximum amount of power that can be drawn by a PC.

Those who visit the product pages for affected models will quickly notice a disclaimer clearly indicating which configurations do and don’t ship to all states. Unfortunately, most configurations of the powerful Alienware Aurora R10 and R12 gaming desktops exceed the local power regulations set in July and thus have been affected by these changes.

For both the Aurora 10 and 12, only one specific configuration ships to all states since it features less power-hungry components and complies with the new CEC power consumption regulations. Surprisingly, the base models have been deemed too powerful, however, the slightly more expensive configuration managed to meet the requirements.

(Image credit: Alienware).

More gaming products to face new power regulations

The CEC Tier 2 implementation is not simply based on an arbitrary value for power consumption, but rather a complex set of energy efficiency standards for PCs such as desktops, all-in-ones, and more. Furthermore, the regulations will begin including multi-screen notebooks and monitors with high refresh rates starting December 9 2021. These restrictions are by no means exclusive to Dell’s Alienware Aurora PCs. However, as reported by The Register, Dell is the first company to publicly acknowledge the restrictions and start canceling shipments to certain states. In the future, other manufacturers will have to make their products more efficient to meet the new standards or completely abandon selling to these areas.

If you happen to live in one of these six states, you might want to consider building your own PC now that individual components such as graphics cards are beginning to drop in price.