10-13-2012, 01:53 AM
(10-12-2012, 10:53 AM)blandyuk Wrote: I know 7970s are faster do to memory speeds but I found the 6000 series to be a bit power hungry. See below:
7970s are faster due to higher clock rates and the new GCN architecture.
(10-12-2012, 10:53 AM)blandyuk Wrote: Not sure how accurate the wattage is but if it's right, the 6970 uses 60 more watts for no performance gain!
The power consumption of the 5000-series is phenomenal, yes. But 6970 does edge out the 5870 for a few algorithms that benefit from the 6970's VLIW4 architecture vs the 5870's VLIW5 architecture, particularly DES-based hashes like descrypt and LM. Other slow and highly-iterated hashes will benefit from VLIW4 as well, and there's potentially even more benefit from GCN.
As amazing as the 5870s and 5970s are -- especially in the perf-per-watt area -- the only problem with buying a 5000-series card right now is that AMD will likely deprecate them within the next 12-18 months. 6000-series should still be good for another 2-3 years.
(10-12-2012, 04:20 PM)paul6990 Wrote: Indeed, a 7970 is slower. Not sure if it's a bug, but this is indeed the speed on 7970.
Probably not a bug per se, but there's likely room for optimization.
I think what we're experiencing here is VLIW5 has been around for quite a while now, and most all of the ways to optimize for that architecture have already been discovered and implemented.
GCN is very much superior to VLIW, but it's a brand-new architecture. I think that over time, new optimizations will be discovered that will allow hashcat to take full advantage of the hardware. And this applies not only to hashcat's kernels, but to the driver development as well.