Having Trouble with 5x 7970's on an ASROCK Extrme4

To begin, I currently have a small 8.5MH/s farm of my own up and running smoothly, so I would like to think that I know what I am doing. However, I have been asked to build a mining rig where the parts had been purchased in December, but yet was still in boxes. Here is the list of equipment that I am working with:

AMD FX 4300
Asrock Extreme 4
8GB of Ram
Silverstone 1500w PSU
Corsair AX1200i
3 - Sapphire 7970 Vapor-X 3GB Edition
2- Sapphire 7970 Vapor-X 6GB Edition (Horrible cards for mining)

I had three cards running on Saturday at ~700, got the extra PSU, added the 2 extra cards and PSU now I am having trouble getting the rig to boot. I have tried BAMT 1.3, 1.4; Xubuntu (Saucy Salamander) using these steps (http://rumorscity.com/2013/12/08/headless-linux-litecoin-miner-setup/). Everything is great until Step 5, XUbuntu detects all 5 cards before I do "sudo reboot" but it won't reboot back into XUbuntu, just hangs on a black screen. I have tried both a flash drive and hard drive. Frustrated last night, I left it sitting there just in case my patience is not what is was earlier yesterday. BAMT also hangs on a black screen, however I can RDP into the machine, but detects no GPU's. I hate to use Windows, but that may be my only option on this machine, working on that today after work.

Any help will be greatly appreciated, I honestly feel defeated; this rig just won't cooperate with me.

If you have any questions, please let me know. Thanks for your help!

I wouldn't even mess with the custom *nix distros if you have under 5 or fewer HD7xxx cards that can use the older drivers.

Win7 x64 + 12.6 Cats + 5 HD7xxx cards = Very good chance you'll get them up and running within an hour.

I've got 2 5 card 7950 boxes in Win7 x64 using the 12.6 Cats and got them both up and running very fast.

Quote from: atp1916 on February 21, 2014, 05:16:09 PM

Thanks, that was my plan for today. Half say no Windows and say use windows.... Angry

BAMT works great on all of my rigs though. Grin

Quote from: chadwickx16 on February 21, 2014, 05:25:07 PM

Quote from: atp1916 on February 21, 2014, 05:16:09 PM

Thanks, that was my plan for today. Half say no Windows and say use windows.... Angry

BAMT works great on all of my rigs though. Grin

As a tip, you don't need to install any external APP SDK with the 12.6s, they come with the openCL runtime and libraries.

Best of luck!

I have a few rigs with 5 7950s running on 970 EXE4 and 990 EXE4 mobos and they have been running fine for almost a year running litecoinbamt.

Gotta boot into failsafe with BAMT for it to recognize all 5 cards.

Trying Windows now, BAMT in failsafe as a backup. Thanks to you both!

Thanks for your help guys, turned out to be a bad card. Angry