02-23-2015, 10:15 PM
As you've identified, most mining rigs run with bare-minimum CPU and RAM, and this is far from ideal for hash cracking rigs. You can sometimes get away with an underpowered CPU, though wordlist manipulation tasks will certainly suck and of course CPU cracking will suck as well, but maybe these are things you just live with. But you can't really skimp out on the RAM. At a minimum you need as much host memory as you do vram. So if you have 4x 7950 with 4GB of vram each in a system, you'll need a minimum of 16GB of host memory. Some people will argue that you can get away with less, but these are people who never progress beyond running simple attacks on simple hashes.