How hashcat uses the hardware?
#1
So, going through Google (and even these forums) you get a ton of conflicting information

Person 1 - "You need x2 the host RAM as you do the GPUs RAM"
Person 2 - "You only need enough host RAM to run the OS"

Person 1 - "I notice a significant drop in performance if the GPUs use less than 4 PCIe lanes"
Person 2 - "You won't even saturate a single PCIe lane"

Person 1 - "Run balanced hardware"
Person 2 - "A cheap CPU is all you need"

It sounds like a fight between miners and people with more money than research; so here's my question.  What data is transferred when brute-forcing and when using a dictionary attack as you run hashcat?  I'll give a couple of examples here, but if anybody wants to go into a deep dive of this subject (or know of a website that does) I would appreciate that a ton.

Brute-force:
Do the GPUs talk to each other much, or report back to the processor much with information via the PCIe lanes?

Dictionary:
How fast are the GPU's ripping information from the storage drive?  Is it enough to saturate 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0 that a newer NVMe uses?

Overall:
Where can hashcat start to bottleneck hardware?
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Messages In This Thread
How hashcat uses the hardware? - by kkatt - 10-03-2022, 05:38 PM
RE: How hashcat uses the hardware? - by kkatt - 10-03-2022, 07:23 PM