Maskprocessor | Hashcat syntax question

[blades1000]

Hi,

Thanks in advance for any help with this.
I'm very new to Hashcat and playing around with my gear cracking hashes. I regularly get the message about 'creating more work....parallelization power'. So tonight I tried to get the maskprocessor command working, but no luck.

Gear = Win10, GTX 980Ti

I've read through the doc's, the forum and I don't have the know how to get it going. This is the command I've tried:

Code:

..\maskprocessor-0.73\mp64.exe -i 7:20 ?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a | hashcat64.exe -m0 -O --status  .\HASHES\unfound.txt -o Found.txt

This command runs, but my Speed drops down to 427 kH/s and in the Candidates: *(RT ->    -K$%
This makes me feel like it's only throwing 4 digit passwords at the hash, when in fact it should be starting with 7 digit candidates?

Whereas, my previous command:

Code:

hashcat64.exe -m0 -a3 -O --status --increment --increment-min 7 --increment-max 20 .\HASHES\unfound.txt ?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a -o Found.txt

Speed: 11552 MH/s with a mask of 7 and an ETA of 1:39hr

I thought by running an mp and pipe, that I might be able to improve my results.
Or am I just reading it all wrong

So my questions are, should I be using an mp and pipe (faster results)?
What would the correct syntax?
Basically trying to brute force passwords between 7 - 20 digits on an MD5 hash.

Thanks again