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Comment by garyfirestorm | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. PCs which consume high power when in idle state.

How is that determined?

Few PCs draw much power when idle. A dual-monitor flat screen setup probably draws more than most idle computers (but yet not in power saving state).

This is for prebuilt machines. Seems pretty easy to test. Turn the thing on, put it in sleep mode, then record the power draw from the PC PSU. Monitors are not included.

You'll see the Dieselgate of PCs. It's very efficient and underclocked while being tested, but when a customer registers the product with the website, the driver app installs the normal performance profiles.

If the computer can easily underclock when idle... why stop doing that?

Because "idle" is not well defined for manufacturers. For instance, core parking is a thing.

As long as it's trying to trigger on idle, I don't see how it would ever cause me a problem. If the CPU load is sufficiently low for cores to park, then let them.

If you want to disable core parking when not idle, that's fine, but it wouldn't even affect the measurements taken by this law.

Idle is pretty well defined. It's when you close the lid of the laptop or hit suspend. The CPU stops running entirely and ram is given some power to persist data.

Record and compare to what?

I was asking how it was determined, but it seems you read half of a proper explanation?

Compared to the regulation stating it may not use more than 11w while suspended.

Which includes a lot of PCs with beefy GPUs. Nvidia in particular has a lot of issues with idle power usage for their cards.

So Nvidia will finally fix the issue worldwide thanks to this local law.

They're really good these days. The fan even switches off entirely when not gaming.

Still a very annoying law because it prevents you from enabling stuff like wake-on-lan on modern PCs. You have to turn off all the power compliance toggles in the BIOS or it will power off the NIC and break a bunch of other stuff. If the vendor doesn't let you disable compliance mode, you're SoL.

Idle PCs consume roughly 0% of the country's energy. If they wanna reduce it anyway, they should put an energy star sticker on computers so people can save money with more efficient machines.

Why can you not use wake on lan? Apple devices still have full networking capabilities while using less than 1w. It doesn't take over 11w to wake on lan unless the firmware is insanely inefficient.

This law will get mobo vendors to fix their products causing power savings world wide.

That is not accurate - take a look at Page 9 of the product compliance datasheet: https://downloads.dell.com/rdoc/dell%20alienware%20ryzen%20e...

WOL and similar features do not change power consumption and this is not where the listed PC's fail. They fail on idle/standby power consumption and to be clear - there is NO reason they have to. Similar spec'd PC's can be purchased that meet these requirements.

Hmm I assumed that this was similar to the EU reg which did lead to NICs being turned off even when you have WoL enabled. The NIC definitely affects idle power consumption and I would not be surprised if vendors take the path of least resistance (disabling features that are only used by "power users") until their hardware meets the requirements.

I'm sure similar PCs meet the requirements, and I'm also sure they're more expensive on average because they are newer. Too bad consumers are not allowed to make choises for themselves.

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