I know a lot of people say you need a decent amount of memory for scrypt mining but I still don't understand why. If I look in taskmgr I see cgminer taking up ~55MB. I am using two 290's. Thoughts?
A lot of people are clueless. I have 5x 290s per mobo with 4GB of ram, and never had an issue. 2GB of ram should be more then enough for a linux miner. That said, the distros like bamt are messed and seem to eat RAM, but my gentoo installs have 90% free memory no matter how many cards are installed.
The Asrock BTC boards will run 5 or 6 R9 290s no problem.
I am curious on your 5 card rig what are you getting per card? Do you ahve the 290 or the 290x's? What model card?