Originally Posted by XFreeRollerX

Anyone know where this spring is? I was looking for it and can't find it to save my life....

Originally Posted by Robilar

Courtesy of the EVGA forums

780i boards and ESA Compliance:

ESA is a system monitoring standard that many of the top manufacturers have agreed to support because it benefits them all. Currently, products like Everest, RivaTuner, NVidia System Monitor and others all have to write their own interface code for the various sensor chips, components, etc. Another problem with the current state of things is that a company that makes performance components like power supplies might want to add an interface that would allow software to monitor temperature, current loads, voltages, etc. except that there would be no guarantee that anyone would support their interface.

With ESA, each party to the standard agrees that all power supplies will use the same monitoring interface, Graphics cards will use another standard interfaces, all fan controllers will have thier own standard interface and so on. This way as soon as a power supply manufacturer releases a new ESA product, it will immediately work with any ESA standard monitor.

There have been many similar standards in the past such as Microsoft's "Perfmon" interface, SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), Java's ARM (Application Response Measurement) and others. These types of standards are extremely good for folks like us that spend lots of money on hardware and just want it all to work together without it being a huge problem. Personally, I think it's going to be very cool to know exactly how much current the graphics cards are sucking up at various performance/temperature levels, how the 12v rails are holding up as maximum current draw is approached or many other such performance measurement combinations that should be possible once fully ESA-equipped computers are available.

The spring on the bottom of the EVGA 780i motherboard is simply attached to the primary SPP heatsink assembly on the top and is designed to ground it to the case. Think of this just like the rear I/O panel with the little tabs that touch the metal cases around the audio, network and USB connectors to ground them to the case. PC's are now running at frequencies that are not only much higher than AM, FM or TV, they are approaching RADAR frequencies so the RFI (Radio Frequency Interference) they generate can play havoc with lots of stuff. Its theorized that some of the newer ESA monitors in development right now have found that their frequency readings are jumping all over if that little spring isn't in place so its advised you to use it since there certainly isn't any down-side to having it in place.

Originally Posted by XFreeRollerX

That spring?

Originally Posted by joemaniaci

oh yehhhhhhhhhhhhhh, that spring, yeh, my new one doesnt have one, weird.

Originally Posted by XFreeRollerX

Might want to fix that statement then. Scared myself silly thinking my incompetence was the reason why my case shorted my board.