A Closer Look at ESA

Final Words

When NVIDIA first showed us ESA just a couple of months ago, we were excited about what ESA might bring to the computer industry and more specifically what it might bring to the desktop of the enthusiast. The PC computer market today is not like the Apple market where one company sets the standards. With the exit of IBM as the standard-bearer many years ago, innovations in the PC industry come from many varied directions. Lately Intel has most influenced those directions with their new bus standards, USB, and the structure of video card communications. AMD has influenced in some areas with HyperTransport, and certainly NVIDIA and ATI (now AMD) have influenced the standards in proprietary ways.

The good news with ESA was that it was proposed by NVIDIA as an Open Standard with no licensing fees, designed to sit on top of the existing USB. The recent approval of the ESA standard by the USB HID committee certainly reinforces that Open Standard concept. Everyone's concern, of course, was whether NVIDIA was truly launching an open standard, since NVIDIA has never been prone to "give away" anything in the past.

Certainly, NVIDIA will benefit from ESA in the short term, but increasingly it appears the whole industry could benefit from where ESA is taking monitoring and control of enthusiast computers. There is nothing preventing every board maker from including ESA capabilities in their chipsets that we can see… other than pride and the "not invented here" attitude that is unfortunately all too prevalent in many computer companies. ESA doesn't even need an OS to run, which should make BIOS level utilities, Linux implementations, and other things we haven't thought of very doable.

NVIDIA has made tremendous progress on the ESA front since it was announced. The test ESA system contains a large number of ESA compliant components that are already available in the marketplace. You can buy the ESA case (at an unexpected premium), the power supply, the motherboard, the memory, the CoolIT Freezone Elite, and every other part of the ESA system today. This begs the question of whether ESA is working now.

Today, users will be very happy with ESA monitoring capabilities. They are quite robust and provide useful information about your computer system with ESA certified components. Some areas - like the motherboard, case, power supply, and memory monitoring - provide all we could desire. Others like the cooler need to provide a bit more useful monitoring info and control capabilities to be truly useful. Overall, the monitoring side of ESA is in very good shape; more capabilities can be added but the functions that are available work very well.

On the control side, there is still work to be done with ESA. The ESA interface did not hold back system overclocking via the BIOS, which eliminates one worry, but it also did not provide the level of system control we could achieve in tweaking the BIOS alone. NVIDIA never said the test system was ready to be reviewed for overclocking performance, so we are pushing in places that are not yet open for criticism in many ways. What we do see in overclocking is promising, and NVIDIA's stated goal that ESA will perform just as well as BIOS in the final release 780/790 provides some reassurance.

It is still a bit puzzling why monitoring and control need to be two utilities in NVIDIA's implementation of ESA. They would be much more useful as one interface where data monitoring is on screen and a right click brings up that data adjustment. In fact, there are certainly people out there that are going to be a bit put off by the glitzy 3D User Interface (which thankfully can be reduced to a more functional 2D palette). We hope some clever NVIDIA Engineering team is working on an improved, unified interface at this very minute, because it seems the easiest way to access and control a system built with ESA certified components.

ESA has come a very long way in a very short time - so much so that we can't wait for the final release 780/790 ESA which should feature fully operational ESA control with no compromises. There are so many things you can do with ESA and the powerful profile capabilities. You can profile top performance for individual games, overclock a single component to the max, set up a maximum overclocking profile, overclock just video or just memory or just whatever component you would like to push from a performance standpoint. You can also create a profile for a silent PC - for sleeping at night and minimizing fan noise - and have that profile automatically kick in at a designated time every day.

ESA can be completely Mickey Mouse if done badly, but that will be the fault of the ESA interface writer. The ESA system itself has the potential for immense power and we look forward to further developments. We also sincerely hope manufacturers of ESA-certified components will see ESA as a means to sell more components than they would otherwise sell instead of an opportunity to extract high prices from ESA system buyers. Manufacturers deserve a profit, but too often in our industry new technology is a license to price gouge. That kind of super premium pricing could doom ESA, or at least those companies that embrace that strategy. End-users are slow to forget those kinds of tactics as new technology rolls out to the market.