Powering up
We setup the machine with the following components
Hardware
Pentium 4 2.66 Northwood Processor.
512MB Corsair XMS DDR3500 CAS2 RAM.
Western Digital 80GB 8MB cache Hard Drive.
Basic 24x CD Rom.
Sapphire Radeon 9700 Pro Graphics Card.
Software
Windows XP Professional SP1
Intel chipset drivers (From supplied CD)
Intel onboard graphics drivers (From Supplied CD)
DirectX 9
ATI Catalyst 3.0 drivers
After powering on for the first time we checked out the bios.
All of our components were recognised correctly first time. The bios provided the usual range of standard features plus a few specialist ones for advanced users to squeeze every ounce of performance from their machine.
The CF-S968 has excellent control over the memory configuration allowing the memory frequency and timings to be set automatically or manually.
For the overclocking fraternity there is adjustable front side bus speed from 133 MHz to 160 MHz. Presumably this range would change if you were using a Celeron or other 100 MHz defaulting processor. It is not possible to lock the AGP or PCI speed.
The bios also provides hardware monitoring. Here we see that our P4 2.66 C1 that has a default vcore voltage of 1.525 volts is running at a slightly reduced voltage of 1.48. The heatsink proved very impressive, as you can see the bios reported the CPU temperature at only 24c.
Unlike the Shuttle the CF-S968 does not have any means of controlling the fan speeds depending on processor temperature.
Noise
Despite the fact that the CF-S968 has two fans that run all the time we found the machine to be very quiet. No one could call it silent, but the noise levels were not intrusive. Cooling proved to be very effective even with the fans obviously set to run quietly.
Audio
The onboard audio provided by the AC97 codec was as good as most other machines using the same codec. We have come to expect high quality on board sound and the CF-S968 does not disappoint, although there is nothing special about it.
On board Graphics
The onboard graphics proved very capable of 2D work. It was comfortable running at resolutions right up to 1600x1200 in windows XP. Memory is taken from the system. You have the option in the bios to allocate up to 128MB of your system Ram to graphics. We did not find any noticeable difference in graphics performance with this set above 64Mb. Image quality was very good. 3D performance was lacking, as we would have expected. Playing some older games, for example Quake III was possible at resolutions up to 800x600, but modern games like Unreal Tournament 2 were unplayable even at 640x480. Anyone looking to use the CF-S968 as a LAN box or gaming machine needs to add an AGP graphics card.
Overclocking
The CF-S968 was quite capable of being overclocked. We were able to push our P4 2.66 up to 3 GHz despite the vcore voltage being some 0.5v below the processors default.
At 152 MHz FSB we found the machine perfectly stable, although the added Radeon 9700 Pro clearly did not welcome the increased AGP frequency as some of the 3D tests failed to run properly. We were able to get into windows at 156 MHz, but stability was very poor.
We would not recommend buying a small format system if you intend to overclock your machine. These boxes are designed to run at stock speed with the lowest heat possible.
