This is my first build. I thought I did my research here, but I guess not. Before I tell you the issue, let me tell you my setup:
Gigabyte Z87X-UD4H motherboard (3 1x PCI-e and 3 16x PCI-e lanes)
6 Sapphire ATI Radeon R9 280x GPUs
4GB G.Skillz RAM
Intel Pentium Haswell CPU
2 PSUs w/ adapter:
1600w Rosewill Hercules (4 GPUs)
750w Rosewill Capstone (2 GPUs)
Every GPU has a powered riser.
Okay, so now to the issue. First I tried BAMT. I get the loading screen and it starts showing me all the services starting until it gets to GDM, then the screen goes black and becomes unresponsive. Tried fiddling with a billion BIOS settings, one GPU only, nothing worked. Gave up on BAMT.
Moving along, I decide to try my own Fedora install. I am a huge fan of Fedora. The LiveCD boots right off the bat. Everything working good until I go to install the latest ATI driver. I install it successfully. Hooray. I reboot and when Xorg tries to initialize...Bam! Black screen.
Okay, so after much tweaking I very sorrowfully I give up on Linux and fall back onto Windows 8. I install Windows 8. Everything goes great. I get into the desktop and look in device manager. All my cards are detected, but as Radeon 7970s or just general Microsoft display adapter. I go to AMD's website and install the latest ATI Radeon drivers (13.12). Screen goes black. Same deal as last time.
Now the weird thing is, if I unplug all but the main card that I have the display hooked to, the OS loads and I can get to the desktop. Device manager shows it as a Radeon R9 200 series. It's just when I try to use multiple GPUs that I get this black screen going on (in Windows anyway, I've given up on Linux entirely as I can't even get one GPU to work with these proprietary ATI drivers).
All the GPUs work fine individually. Apparently they don't like teamwork.
I am absolutely baffled here. I've been working at this for two days straight. It's like the drivers just won't initialize for more than one card. Do I need dummy plugs? 2350 watts of power is surely enough?!
Here is a photo of my setup:
https://i.imgur.com/yP2Mcml.jpgOn top of this, I got 4 Gigabyte Radeon R9 290s sitting here, waiting on the rest of the parts to build another 4 GPU rig. Maybe I jumped the gun a bit on this one.
Thank you for any help in advance.
