Enthusiast System-Architecture (ESA)

Josh Collins expects good things from ESA, and so far it’s delivering in spades.

The Enthusiast System-Architecture, or ESA as it is more commonly known, is an open platform standard initially conceived by NVIDIA and then shared with and pushed by a considerable number of manufacturer partners.

NVIDIA’s partners in this grandiose plan to provide enthusiasts with a protocol that provides real-time communication and system control include the likes of OEM heavy weights Dell, HP and Alienware, motherboard giants such as ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, XFX and EVGA and cooling and PSU power houses such as Silverstone, Coolermaster, Tagan, PC Power and Cooling and Thermaltake.

With an already strong list of partners, most of whom are gradually updating product lines with ESA compliant and tested hardware revisions, the move to push this open standard has truly opened up and gotten some pace behind it.

But still, what the goodness gracious is it?

The concept behind ESA is to provide an open protocol for manufacturers and vendors that offers real-time communication between sub-systems of the PC. This allows for different areas to be tweaked for thermal, acoustic and performance characteristics.

Perhaps the coolest aspect of ESA is its ease of use. The application has very obviously been written with high priority and focus on the end user being able to not only easily interpret the information but also to customise how they interact with it.



For example, the GPU temperature monitor is not only straight forward to acknowledge visually but can be given a unique name instead of the default one. Furthermore the actual polling of the temperature read by the onboard temp probe can be change to poll at a maximum value of 60 second intervals and a minimum of a flush 500ms. Additionally, to ensure that a component doesn’t overheat during operation, a temperature threshold can be set, and there’s an option for the system to give a visual alert – great for those hot summer months!

Being the enthusiast-minded chaps we are, one of the first questions that came to mind when we came across this protocol was the level of impact and overhead this would have on system performance. Much to our pleasure we were informed that, even when polling every 500ms, ESA would use less than one per cent of system resources. We don’t know about the rest of you but to see such a bounty of system information, with such a low overhead, certainly left an impression on us.

With the ability to modify polling latencies you also get a lot of power over thermal and acoustic characteristics, like being able to turn fans down from 100 per cent to 75 per cent for better acoustics, and then up again for performance while gaming, and this open standard allows this to be done all through a single application rather than the myriad of programs needed otherwise.



If you happen to have recently purchased a 780i- or 790i-based motherboard, download the available software from the NVIDIA website or install it from the driver disc and check it out. For the rest of us, keep your eyes peeled as ESA compliant hardware begins to become more readily available on the retail market.

After our experience with the platform we hope this can grow to be an accepted standard, but with standards popping up every which way recently – especially in the audio visual arena – we hope that this one can get its footing and stand firm.