4 card cracking Rigg

[JaneTheCracker]

Hello Fellow Crackers

I am planning on building a new hashcat rig with a budget of 3000 euros. 

I made the following graph based on the actual prices:

                ntlm MH/s    Price     price/ntlm         amount        total ntlm      Total gpu cost
1080ti       52715.6       800       0.015175773    2                  105431.2      1600
1080         41354.8       580       0.014024974    4                  165419.2      2320
1070ti       39107.7       495       0.012657354    4                  156430.8      1980
1070         29890.8       470       0.015723902    4                  119563.2      1880

I currently have the following rig:

• i7 3770
  
• 32gb 1333mhz ram
  
• P8Z77-M PRO (mATX)
  
• 2x gtx 760 fe
  
• 1600 watt psu
  

So I am thinking of buying new cpu, mobo and ram:
i5 8400                                          183,-
Corsair vengeance 32GB 1600mhz    311,-
Asus ROG Maximus X Apex              311,-
4x 1070ti                                       1980,-

for a total of 2781,-

I still have a couple of questions:

1. Does the CPU matter for hashcat?
   
2. Does the amount of ram matter for hashcat?
   
3. Does the speed of the ram matter for hashcat?
   

I would like to hear your guys opinion and feedback.

[undeath]

Does the CPU matter for hashcat?

Unless you do CPU-cracking, no.

Does the amount of ram matter for hashcat?

Ideally you have vRam = Ram

Does the speed of the ram matter for hashcat?

no

Why are you upgrading CPU+MB?

[JaneTheCracker]

Why are you upgrading CPU+MB?

First off, thank you for the quick reply!
I am upgrading the cpu and mobo because the current one only has 2 pcie slots. and the 4 cards are faster then the 2. I am building in a large tower so idealy I wouldn't want to use rizers.

One more question, does the speed of the ssd where the wordlists are stored matter?

[undeath]

Drive speed only matters in so far as that it influences start time. Once hashcat is running it doesn't (unless you run a straight wordlist attack on a fast hash, but that's inefficient anyway).

[royce]

IMO, hardware beef correlates with interest/focus on password cracking.

If you just want to improve general cracking throughput, you'll be fine following everything that undeath says. Most of the non-GPU-speed factors don't matter. The RAM=VRAM thing is good.

But as you start getting more focused on cracking, you'ill want more CPU (for processing wordlists, or using tools that generate password candidates and pipe them into hashcat; one core per GPU also good there), more RAM (for faster sorting/sifting of large wordlists/cracks/output/inputs; the RAM=VRAM thing is probably a fine match there anyway) and more and faster disk (same reason as RAM; useful to have both medium-sized SSD for processing data, and a large HDD for storage of large data).

Also, I was telling people PCI-E x4 is the minimum, but I was told recently by evilmog that eventually, you hit some bottlenecks that make x8 the sweet spot. But you have to go quite a ways down the cracking rabbit hole before you get there, I think.

If you think you might get into it more, you can at least make sure that you have an upgrade path -- getting a board that's capable of a faster CPU, more RAM, etc. That way, you can save money on the other stuff until you get the point that you want more - and then you'll know better what else you need.

[Mem5]

The RAM=VRAM thing is good.

Do you mean that if you have 4 cards of 8GB RAM each, one must have 32GB RAM (on MB) ?

[undeath]

That's correct.

[royce]

(Well, it's not *strictly* a 100% requirement for some attacks - but definitely required for others). You should try to get as close to that as possible, though.