MPC CLIENTPRO 365

This just in and more to follow as I explore the full hardware compatibility for these machines.

I have 2 MPC CLIENTPRO 365's and 6 MPC CLIENTPRO AIO 414's and I have noticed that there is no reference to this hardware here, so I decided to see how things go and begin writing about them.

These machines are prevalent on eBay and many people do not know what to do with them as they are a rare breed, especially since MPC is no longer in operation. So; support and drivers are very limited if non-existent, unless you count mpcdrivers dot com. Which I have had no luck with.

The 414's came without power adapters so I have not played with them yet, but they do look promising and adapters are available on eBay and other sites. The 365's are very impressive 3GHz HT P4's on a decent intel board (Which I am currently writing a page aboout and will link here.) although all MPC's are proprietary with there unusual power routing, network, and video chips. This is why so many people are having difficulty configuring their products. This is good in a way since that difficulty keeps the prices down to an awesome level. (I have 8 machines on a modest budget.)

My first experience was naturally with the 365 since it has a fairly standard PC chassis and PSU for the most part.*
(*Sort of traditional; comes in 2 flavors: Mid tower and a smaller Desktop which I have. )

• Cons:
  • 1. The smaller desktop is a low profile box which limits expansion card height.
  • 2. The board has limited slots on both models afaik. (Details will be on the MB page I am currently writing.)

I threw in a WD 320GB and a 1GB ram stick then loaded Winblows XP pro and tried Ubuntu 12.04 in a dual boot config. The network and audio do not work Out Of The Box (OOTB) in either instance.

After a little research I tracked down some drivers and got the network to run in xp. I started reading about LinuxMCE today and thought these machines would be perfect for such a task. A little disturbed about the driver issue, I later read on this site that 8.10 was the latest stable release, which got me thinking... Yep, these are older machines and the latest Ubuntu releases are focusing more on the newer hardware, let me dig through my archives. I dug out an old 8.04 386 kubuntu release and I am currently running it in live mode; Wow! As I suspected; Everything works without a hitch. Right OOTB, a marriage made in heaven.

So I will clean up this page and give you very specific hardware info on the 365 soon. As of right now it looks like the 365 with its intel D915GRV are going to get along great. These boards can handle up to 4gb of ram and have a LGA775 socket with a mean cooler & fan combo.

More to come soon.