Performance drop with partially known long plain NTLM

[tetraburmium]

I hate to double post, but I did try using -plus with a single entry dictionary containing my five letters, a 7 character mask, and the single hash and only achieved about 2.8 M/s at best (compared to about 1600 M/s in -plus with a standard mask attack). Am I to understand that the hybrid+mask algorithm still suffers from a similar left-side unoccupied performance bottleneck?