Benchmark data request

[epixoip]

... what on earth are reference design cards, how do i identify them ?

You can read more about reference design cards here: http://hashcat.net/forum/thread-3949-pos...l#pid22844

... i assumed buying a motherboard + videocard from the same vendor would be most optimal ?

No, it literally does not matter one bit.

I'm aware the chipset is what makes a GPU tick. What made me drop the initial post was i saw mention of AMD R9 290X but there was no mention of the amount of RAM installed, if the system and/or card had been overclocked etc.

That's because motherboard, RAM, and CPU overclocking are all largely irrelevant, or at most inconsequental, for GPU cracking performance.

Benchmarks should mention if the GPU is overclocked, however. If the post does not state, you can safely assume stock clocks were used.

Right now the benchmark content is littered across the forums i pressume ? Or is there like a central repository which may provide an interface for comparison.

Correct, it's not well-organized. You can use the search feature on the forums.

... in addition, given the use of AVX, SSE and other CPU extensions and for example the i7-5820K offering a huge amount of L3 cache, would there be any decent performance to obtain for hash cracking ?

i7-5820K has support for AVX2, which hashcat-cliAVX2 is able to take advantage of for some algorithms. But this only matters for CPU cracking, not GPU cracking. The amount of L3 cache isn't really that important for CPU cracking. Most algorithms are register-based, or stay in L1 cache.