Nvidia ESA allows you to control your chassis, coolers and PSU

Posted at: 3:35am 5th November 2007 by Ben Hardwidge and Alex Watson

New open standard promises complete control over your PC’s temperature, noise and performance

Fickle graphics card namer Nvidia has just announced another three-letter acronym to learn in the form of ESA. This stands for Enthusiast System Architecture (ESA), and it’s intended to give enthusiasts complete control over their PC’s temperature, speed and noise.

Nvidia’s product PR manager for Northern Europe, Adam Foat, explained to Custom PC that ESA ‘is a cutting-edge interface that will allow disparate PC components, including power supplies, chassis and cooling devices to communicate with each other and report valuable information back to the end user.’ He also added that ‘ESA will afford end users the ability to monitor and control these devices, all in real time, providing them a valuable tool for obtaining the best performance, reliability and overclocking out of their system.’

The idea is that the independent components in your PC that don’t communicate via a system bus, such as the chassis, coolers and PSU, will now be able to communicate with your operating system. An ESA component will feature an embedded microcontroller, which will then hook up to the PC via USB, either externally through a cable, or internally via a motherboard header. This microcontroller is capable of both sending and receiving information, but whether a component can both send and receive information is up to the manufacturer.

Nvidia recently demonstrated the technology to Custom PC, which showed the ability to control pretty much everything in terms of power and cooling from the same screen. The test system Nvidia used was fitted with an ESA-compatible liquid cooling system from CoolIT; using Nvidia’s software you could track the CPU temperature, and give the cooler a target CPU temperature by adjusting a slider switch inside the app.

You were then also able to record system information, including temperature settings to an XML log file, and to keep specific data displayed on screen even with the application minimised. Nvidia’s software also boasts a fancy, OpenGL powered 3D interface – meaning it’s the first 3D application the company has ever developed for PC users.

As well as this, it looks as though any company will be able to use the technology, without paying license fees to Nvidia. Adam Foat told Custom PC that the standard would be ‘completely open’ and that ‘anyone can write software for it,’ meaning that you don’t necessarily have to use Nvidia’s software either. So what’s in it for Nvidia? Foat simply explained that ‘it’s good for the whole industry; we need everything to come together.’

In order to carry the ESA logo, as well as needing the ESA controller chip, components will need to be certified – a process which needs to be undertaken at a third party lab in Taiwan. While Nvidia’s software will only be available for Windows at launch, the company is hoping the open nature of the standard will make it easy for the open source community to create monitoring software for Linux.