AnandTech: NVIDIA Introduces ESA - Enthusiast System Architecture

A couple of the nicer utilities available with any motherboard chipset are NVIDIA's NV Monitor and nTune. They only work completely on NVIDIA chipsets, and not all manufacturers have implemented all the hooks necessary to support the software utility. However, when it is available and working properly it provides a lot of info about your system and a fair amount of system control. When the NVIDIA 680i was our cooling test motherboard we used NV Monitor to measure CPU temperature, in a large part because we found the utility easy to use and it provided very repeatable results.

nTune also works on any motherboard to control NVIDIA video cards, which it can do automatically or manually. However, on an NVIDIA chipset like the 680i nTune has many additional capabilities. As we saw in the 680i launch, nTune 5.05 had ambitions to become the control center for overclocking your motherboard and video card. Of course, this only worked at launch if your motherboard had an NVIDIA 680i chipset, you used an NVIDIA 8800 video card, and the manufacturer fully implemented the nTune hooks. NVIDIA has expanded nTune with new hardware introductions, but many computer enthusiasts - the primary target of the utility - still seem to either ignore or at best feel ambivalent towards the tool.

One thing was very clear in that introduction, however. NVIDIA had a great interest in providing enthusiasts with all the overclocking tools they could to set NVIDIA apart as being the company for enthusiasts. With each new chipset, the enthusiast tools seem to get a bit more ambitious.

Today, with the coming introduction of the NVIDIA 780i chipset, NVIDIA is looking to make serious changes to what is possible with enthusiast systems by launching a new technology platform. The name of the new standard is ESA - Enthusiast System Architecture. Its goal is to provide information and control to enthusiasts not just for NVIDIA motherboards and video cards, but to provide that information and control for many other components in an ESA-enabled system.

ESA monitoring and control will extend to processors, motherboards, video cards, cooling hardware, and power supplies. This is not necessarily everything ESA can monitor and control, but it is a starting point. In theory, any component could implement ESA and potentially be controlled by ESA.

ESA hardware and the software to monitor/manage it will not be available for a few weeks, but NVIDIA has chosen today to allow editors to start talking about the ESA specification. This means a closer look at what ESA really is, how it works, who has signed on to provide ESA components, and how this will all work in providing the enthusiast unprecedented control of their computer system.