Dell has reportedly canceled orders for its Alienware Aurora R12 and R10 gaming desktops in certain US territories. Apparently, if you try to configure either of these systems, you will be notified with a warning saying that your order will not be accepted if the delivery address is in one of the affected six states.

"This product cannot 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 canceled," reads the message. PC Gamer suggests that the reason for that is the introduction of the new energy efficiency standards for PCs and monitors.

Gamers have been relying on prebuilt gaming desktops as one of the alternatives to building their own rig, especially with the whole GPU price inflations and chipset shortages. Apart from its gaming laptop lineup, Dell offers the Alienware Aurora gaming desktops. The latest models are available with 11th-gen Intel Rocket Lake-S or AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs paired with the NVIDIA Geforce RTX 30-series GPUs. However, a majority of the configurations will be unavailable to customers in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, or Washington.

According to Dell, "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."

California was the first US state to approve energy efficiency standards for PCs and monitors in 2016. It was anticipated that this could save 2.3 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year and significantly reduce carbon pollution coming from power plants. This is just one of many upcoming regulations where system integrators will have to calculate power consumption before offering certain models to these states. December 2021 will witness the expansion of these regulations that will affect computers with high-speed networking capability, multi-screen notebooks, notebooks with cyclical behavior, and monitors with high refresh rates.

The rules seem to be pretty strict as apart from the entry-level configurations, customers cannot get their hands on high-end hardware. For instance, the Aurora R12 is available in a total of five configurations, out of which only the first two comply with the energy efficiency norms. Basically, all you can get is an Intel Core i5-11400F, GeForce GTX 1650 Super, 8GB of single-channel DDR4-3200 RAM, and 256GB SSD with a 1TB HDD. Similarly, for the R10, you can only choose between the two cheapest options going up to an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, Radeon RX 5600, 8GB of single-channel DDR4-3200 RAM, and 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD.

If you are looking forward to purchasing the new Alienware R10 or the R12, various configurations are still listed and currently selling on Amazon: