Done my research, now I need a review. 20 GPU cracking cluster.
#17
(02-08-2016, 07:11 PM)concedonulli Wrote: I reached out to Sagitta for a quote on a box with 980 TIs.

Can you PM me with the email address you contacted us with so I can ensure you receive your Hashcat Forums discount?

(02-08-2016, 07:11 PM)concedonulli Wrote: So, do you mind if we step through it all?

Sure.

The specific GPU you picked is extremely inappropriate for hash cracking. You picked an OEM design GPU with 3x axial coolers on a vertical-fin heatsink, which was clearly designed for gaming workloads and will be unable to cope with compute workloads. You will have massive cooling and reliability issues if you attempt to pack four of these into a single system. This has been covered extensively on these forums, so this alone tells me you didn't really do much research, as anyone who has spent even an hour on these forums knows you only buy reference design GPUs for hashcat.

You mentioned this was going into a datacenter, so desktop ATX case makes no sense. For a 4-GPU system you'd be better off with something like Chenbro RM41300-FS81 or Supermicro 7048GR-TR (both of these chassis are rackmountable and specifically designed for GPGPU.)

The PSU you picked isn't really that great. It looks good on paper, but it's not the best option. Also 1200W isn't giving you very much headroom. You'd be pushing it with 4x 980 Ti, when cracking e.g. NTLM you'd be at ~87% load. For maximum efficiency you want to be around 50% load, so I'd go with something like an EVGA 1600 T2 instead.

64GB of RAM doesn't make much sense. 980 Ti only has 6GB of VRAM so your host memory requirements would be an absolute maximum of 24GB . So 32GB of RAM would be more far more appropriate, but as you can't really use the full 6GB of VRAM for hashcat, 16GB of RAM would likely be more than sufficient. 

2TB of storage also doesn't make much sense (assuming you're doing RAID-5.) You'll surely never use more than 100GB on the compute nodes. 1TB would be more appropriate for the cluster controller, which you've not specified (maybe you didn't realize you'd need one?) I'm also not crazy about Mushkin SSDs, I tend to lean toward Intel or Crucial.

Lastly the CPU cooler you picked would be terrible for chassis airflow. If you were to actually use your CPU for cracking (which I presume you will since you picked such a high-end CPU), this cooler likely wouldn't be able to keep up, and not only would the CPU temps be very high, but the temperature inside the chassis would rise quickly as well. A Dynatron R-series cooler with some Delta chassis fans would be far more appropriate.


Messages In This Thread
RE: Done my research, now I need a review. 20 GPU cracking cluster. - by epixoip - 02-08-2016, 08:46 PM