nVidia System Monitor
ESA basically breaks down into three applications, nVidia System Monitor, nVidia Control Panel, and NVProfile, whose purpose I haven’t determined. First I will cover the System Monitor.
The nVidia System Monitor is the 3D dashboard I mentioned previously. It is an overlay covering the entire desktop, and the opacity is adjustable. To open the monitor, double click the icon in the tray. In the center of the screen is a 3D “circle” of hardware, including a motherboard, memory module, CPU, video card, hard drive, and if you have ESA compliant hardware; a case, a power supply, and a CPU waterblock. Click on an icon, the icons spin around until the one you clicked reaches the front, and windows appear below the “circle” of relevant information from that item.
For example, click on the video card, and you see GPU Temp, GPU Core Clock, GPU Memory Clock, and GPU Shader Clock. Each icon has the information you’d expect.
Here we see GPU, CPU, and memory.
Motherboard, case, and hard drive.
Network and watercooling.
And to me, the coolest one is the power supply. Not only are all voltages listed, but individual rail voltages, PSU temperature, fan speed, and actually the amperage being used on each rail.
Anyway, you can spend a lot of time playing with the graphics, but this is for monitoring only, no tweaking is done from the nVidia System Monitor. But there is other stuff you can do, such as setting up event logging and setting hotkeys. You can even set up to run real-time graphs, which is a very cool feature.