Build advice

[oldmate89]

Hi all, 

First time poster here and have really appreciate the community Hashcat have. I have been through the FAQ's and the loads of information available on both GitHub and the Hashcat forums but was hoping for a bit of specific advice on the current build I am looking at. 

What is the purpose of the build: Cracking my Ether Presale JSON Wallet (16300) with PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 encryption. I plan on using a combination of word lists and rules sets as I know the majority of the inputs for the password and as far as I understand from my research a brute-force would take centuries (if not longer). 
Subsequent to cracking my password - the use of the PC will be limited, however am ready to invest in the appropriate specs to crack my wallet but would like to limit costs where possible. 

I would be very appreciative for any advice/recommendations you could in terms of my proposed build below and whether I should focus more on GPU's than the CPU. From my research, the upside from GPU on PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 encryption is limited but please correct me if I have been misled.

Ideally, I would like to find the ideal cost/benefit of the specs below and if there is anything I am missing (i.e. additional fans/water cooling etc..)

Thanks in advance  

Proposed build
Case: NZXT Source 340 Mid-Tower Gaming Case w/ USB 3.0, Side-Panel Window (Black Colour)

Extra Case Fans: Default Case Fan

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1700 3.0GHz [3.7GHz Turbo] Eight-Core 16MB L3 Cache 65W Processor

CPU Cooling: Cooler Master Seidon 240V High Performance Liquid Cooling system w/ 240mm Radiator *** Extreme OC *** (Cooler Master CPU Water Cooling *** Extreme OC ***)

Motherboard: MSI B350 Tomahawk AMD B350 Chipset, ATX Mainboard w/ 4 RAM slots, HD Audio, GbLAN, USB3.0, SATA-III /s, RAID, 1 x PCIe x16, 1 x PCIe x4, 2 x PCIe x1, 2 x PCI

Memory (RAM): 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4/2400mhz Dual Channel Memory (Adata XPG Z1 w/Heat Spreader)

Graphics Card (GPU): MSI AMD Radeon RX 570 4GB Armor Video Card (Single Card)

SLI BRIDGE: None

PSU (Power Supply): 500 Watts Power Supplies (Cooler Master MasterWatt Lite 500watt Gaming Power Supply)

PSU Braided Cable: NONE

M.2 SSD Drive: None

Internal PCI-E SSD Card: None

Hard Drive (HDD / SSHD / SSD): 1TB Seagate SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 7200RPM Hard Drive (Single Hard Drive)

[undeath]

A low-end cpu will do. If you want a Ryzen the 1200 would work. Get a Geforce 1080Ti FE. AMD GPUs are crap. 8GB RAM would cut it.

edit: and holy shit, water cooling?? did you copy this build from a stupid gaming forum?

[oldmate89]

Thanks undeath- that’s really helpful. I had used a custom PC build site for this and the Hashcat FAQ mentioned GPUs can overheat using hashcat but presumably from your response, it is completely unnessecary for my purposes.

I have updated build below with changes in bold italics. Are there any other GPUs you would recommend at a lower cost without losing too much performance? 

Case: NZXT Source 340 Mid-Tower Gaming Case w/ USB 3.0, Side-Panel Window (Black Colour)
Extra Case Fans: Default Case Fan
CPU (Processor): AMD Ryzen 3 1200 3.1GHz [3.4GHz Turbo] Quad -Core 8MB L3 Cache 65W Processor
CPU Cooling: AMD Standard CPU Cooler
Motherboard: MSI B350 Tomahawk AMD B350 Chipset, ATX Mainboard w/ 4 RAM slots, HD Audio, GbLAN, USB3.0, SATA-III /s, RAID, 1 x PCIe x16, 1 x PCIe x4, 2 x PCIe x1, 2 x PCI
Memory (RAM): 8GB (1x8GB) DDR4/2400mhz Dual Channel Memory (Adata XPG Z1 w/Heat Spreader)
Graphics Card (GPU): GeForce® GTX 1080 Ti 11GB Video Card (Single Card)
PSU (Power Supply): 600 Watts Power Supplies (Cooler Master MasterWatt Lite 600watt Gaming Power Supply)
PSU Braided Cable: NONE
M.2 SSD Drive: None
Internal PCI-E SSD Card: None
Hard Drive (HDD / SSHD / SSD): 1TB Seagate SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 7200RPM Hard Drive (Single Hard Drive)

[undeath]

A CPU water cooler won't help much with keeping your GPU cooled and anyway, a water cooler is not necessarily better than an air cooler. A case with proper airflow and GPUs with blower fans (such as FE editions) will generally do a much better job.

Depending on your budget you can get a 1080Ti > 1080 > 1070Ti > 1070

[oldmate89]

Ok excellent - thanks! I though I had selected All in one cooling for both GPU and CPU but that brought your solid advice.

Thank you again - I will take a look at the range of 1070 and 1080 GPU against the benchmarks posted on other forums   

Apologies in advance if this is a dumb question but using brute force against a 10-11 character encrypted hash (capitalised, symbols and numbers) even over a 12 month period is not possible?

[Flomac]

Apologies in advance if this is a dumb question but using brute force against a 10-11 character encrypted hash (capitalised, symbols and numbers) even over a 12 month period is not possible?

Nope.

[oldmate89]

Ok - cheers. I should hopefully be OK with my word list and rule set

[tacohashcat]

Might want to add another case fan in the front to help pull cool air in.

[oldmate89]

I saw a comment before but now I can't see it. You mentioned I should go with the Founders Edition over the MSI Cards. Is there much of a performance difference between them?

[undeath]

Performance is the same but durability (quality) and cooling is superior.