Nvidia ESA is DOA

[Alpine]

Attach USB to your watercooling kit. Or not.


NVIDIA HAS PUBLICLY released its specifications for a new hardware monitoring standard it is calling ESA - the 'Enthusiast System Architecture'.

The various previews of the technology around the web today lend the new 'specification' a huge amount of pomp and ceremony, without actually showing any hard data or products.

At its core, ESA is simply a protocol standard for reporting peripheral information back to the operating system for the system to make sense of. The green team anticipates seeing a USB interface implemented for water cooling components, power supplies and chasses - allowing for voltages, temperatures, water levels, status etc to be monitored by the user and for the system to work with, meaning the speed of fans could be altered on the fly and suchlike.

The green team says that it has lined up several large manufacturers - including HP, Dell, Asus, Gigabyte and MSI - to implement the technology.

Of course, this will only be available through Nvidia's own next-gen
products - you can forget about seeing the tech on Intel or AMD boards, for now at least.

System reporting has been a stagnant area of enthusiast interest ever since the waning days of Motherboard Monitor. Can Nvidia spark a new wave of thermometer sales? We suspect that engineers should have taken the temperature of the market before launching this one - this is a solution to a problem nobody is interested in contemplating, let alone solving.

Unless the real meal deal is in the mainstream sector and in diagnosing hardware faults, we're pretty sure enthusiasts have their own backs covered on this one.

The INQuirer