I am having an extraordinary amount of problems trying to install Linux onto my PC. I've tried to install various flavours of Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, Mageia, LinuxMinut, etc) on the PC described below, and also booting onto the LiveCD versions of those flavours - but they all just seem to freeze on the main bootscreen.

I don't seem to have any keyboard or mouse function, the CD does flash for a little while but then nothing. Certainly no error messages that I can take away with me.

The installation goes pretty much the same way as the LiveCD, I get to see the main splash screen and then nothing seems to move from there. I've tested all the CDs and made sure nothing was wrong with the drives and even replaced hard drives, etc.

The PC does also have a Windows 7 boot disk, which I put in seperately, and that has no issues at all. I've also ran a full spate of memory and video tests with nothing come up as wrong.

Motherboard
Gigabyte G1.Sniper M5
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=4482#ov

Chipset
Intel Z87 (Socket 1150) DDR3 Motherboard

CPU
Intel Intel Core i7 4770K Haswell Quad Core CPU

Memory
Vulcan RED 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-17100C11 2133MHz Dual Channel RAM

Audio
Creative Sound Core 3D chip

LAN
Qualcomm Atheros Killer E2201 chip (10/100/1000 Mbit)

Video
2x KFA2 GeForce GTX 680 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express (SLI Connected)

[U]Monitors[U]
2x Philips 29" LED Monitors (DisplayPort connected)

Am I missing anything obvious that I haven't tried? I have tried googling to see if there were issues with DisplayPort based monitors, but nothing has come up - and I did connect a 3rd monitor to the system via DVI, but got the same issue.

Any help would be HUGELY appreciated.

Try a live boot of Sabayon to see if it works. It supports %99 of hardware out of the box, or they used to claim so anyways. After booting check system logs for errors. Or you can try Ubuntu (or your preferred) again and when the Live boot stops, press ctrl+alt+F1 and you should see so information. If it's not F1 just cycle through the F-keys. You might be lucky enough to find a command prompt in there too if your boot went far enough, in which case you can check the logs for errors.

That command should give you enough, if not try

That second one will give you the ability to scroll through all the entries.

I hope that helps.

In the past I've found the ancillery chips the problem with the "latest-and-greatest" motherboards - not the basic Intel chips which tend to be pretty well supported in the (latest) kernel. In my case it was a Micron chip on a Gigabyte motherboard a few years back. I was able to get a basic system going however, so was able to compile my own kernel when the support hit Linus' tree.
I might be inclined to download a gentoo minimal CD image and see if that works - they tend to be very current, but as it says "minimal".

IMHO it's the UEFI.

A few suggestions-

Check to make sure that you've set the video to 'PCIe' in the BIOS.

Try removing video card #2.

Try a few of the kernel options on booting (e.g. nomodeset)

You are using currently supported and fairly new versions/releases, right?

What versions have you tried?

Try a usb.

Set bios to failsafe or default settings.

Could be some issue with the optical reader or burner or even the media you are using.

Could be bad downloads.

Excellent point. I recently installed a z87 motherboard that is UEFI only. Even when you try to turn off all the "Win8" option and use "legacy" mode, the Linux installers I tried all recognised the underlying UEFI BIOS. I could only get output when I disabled the on-board Intel graphics - didn't bother trying a screen in that port, I wanted to use the add-on.