Just curious, but how much ram did you need?
I'm try to get a rig of 5 cards up and running. I initially bought 4 GB and have more on the way. Wondering if 8/16/32 is required for 5 cards. Right now I have 2 up and running with low intensity just to have something hashing. Hoping 8GB for 5 cards will be enough, but anyone's input would be appreciated.
Edit: Running ASUS R9 290 cards if it matters.
M5A99FX PRO R2.0 AM3+
GSkill Ripjaw 4GB ram
sempron 145
I am running 4x R9 290s and I had to upgrade from 4GB to 16GB to get it to run at all.
The thread concurrency for the 290s and 290x is usually over 30000 so you need a lot of RAM for the initial startup. Once it starts, RAM doesn't matter any more.
A way to test this is to set your thread concurrency really low to see if it starts properly. Maybe something around 8192 to start. If everything starts up that way but not when you set it to the default concurrency(30592 for mine), you need more RAM.
EDIT: You should also find out what your default thread concurrency is for your cards, it can vary from card to card. The way to check this is to delete all your .bin files from your cgminer folder and start up cgminer with no thread concurrency number set(just delete the field from your config file or set to 0). Once cgminer starts running, stop the process and look at the newly created .bin file. It will have a number in it's name that gives you the default max thread concurrency for your card. If you set it higher than that, prepare to get hardware errors and rejected shares.