The lengths some people will go to for the best possible performance never ceases to amaze me. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's a bad thing, even if most of use don't have access to liquid nitrogen or want to use cooking oil as a cooling medium.

Pitching somewhere closer to the mainstream, Nvidia has just announced a new standard to let cooling systems talk with each other called Enthusiast System Architecture or ESA. The official release claims that Dell, CoolerMaster and Thermaltake are among the companies joining in.

A quick read of the technical paper (more accessible than most I have to say) reveals that ESA is based around USB. This sounds like a good idea to me, why reinvent the wheel if there is already a good technology in place.

It's not the first time I've heard of Nvidia doing this. A little while ago I went to a briefing about a new programming language they had developed called Cg (c for graphics). It faced the usual problem that different graphics cards manufacturers all had their own tricks but according to it's page on Wikipedia has been used by games such as Far Cry.