Advice on budget GPU for my budget WPA2 build please...

[Chronicus]

I have a rig already, but its an old setup. I dont have a lot of money..pretty broke really lol..but I keep myself busy tinkering with stuff I have accumulated over the years. Mostly computer related things. My main desktop crapped out on me followed by the laptop, and I went without any comuter for a couple years. Well I managed to acquire enough stuff to get a working PC and a working laptop. I call it "Trex" because its a dinosaur and its huge haha. So it has a Radeon HD 5670..not fast, but I got it for free..which was totally within my budget .

Computers specs as I got it:

Dell Studio XPS 9100
Intel Core i7-930
9 GB Tri-Channel DDR3 RAM
AMD Radeon HD 5670 1GB
No HDD
PSU didnt work
fans squealing

So I upgraded a couple things over the last few months:

Apevia Spirit ATX-SP700 700W PSU
1TB NVME M.2 SSD w/ PCIe adapter for storage. I also install all my "Program Files" onto this.
64GB Sabrent SSD thought SATA3 for booting to and storing the OS (Windows 10]
ton of extra HDDs
some quieter fans with RGB

I got it to boot to a GRUB and then use the NVME for the OS partitions. Wont boot on an NVME.
I also have dual-boot (tri-boot?] to Ubuntu 22.04 and 14.04 Server LTS
I was playing around with every driver I could to get this Radeon HD 5670 to play nice with Hashtcat 6.2.6 but I never got it do work with the GPU, only the CPU. I tried every version and it works with both CPU and GPU on Hashcat 3.20 in both Linux and Windows.

It has six slots for RAM and it is Trie-channel, and it came with a GPU, and it was free..so it has that going for it.
I got the NVME, even though it didnt have an M.2 slot because I figured when I upgrade the motherboard later I can take advantage of that.

ANYWAYS...I got a little bit of spending money, and I was looking to get a decent GPU for WPA2 cracking to tinker around with. As it is I can get the job done with the old Radeon, but I definitely have to leave it running and kind of forget about it while I do something else for a while before it cracks anything, if anything. I have some captures and I remain 5 hashes it hasnt been able to crack.

I was looking at the 1660 Super new or and a plain old used 1070 Ti. Im surpised that those actually still hold at least some value. I had one back when they came out.

Also, I dont care about gaming or anything else. If I could get a GPU that costs the same as a new 1660 Super but could never game on it, but is better at cracking WPA2, Id be fine with that.

What GPU are my broke brethren running out here on hashcat forums??? What other GPUs should I be looking at in the "broke as hell" category? 

Thanks :]

[Chronicus]

Well guys it looks like the broke-people gods were smiling down on me tonight. I thought "Hey, why not check out Craigslist?"

Saw a listing for a PNY GeForce RTX 3080 12GB UPRISING Triple Fan LHR, and it was listed for $250 local pickup, and the guy was like 15 minutes away from where I live. I msg'd the guy, said "Hey man, I got $220...but I'm ready to rock 'n roll right now bro".

I figured maybe either I don't know what I'm doing here, and Im blowing money on something that isn't worth it, and I'm making a mistake, or this guy isnt for real, for whatever reason.

I made sure to test it before forking over the money. Dude had a sick setup. He just upgraded to a 4080. Alienware, 13900K, RGBs every where. Sick AIO, tons of fans. Sick gaming mouse. keyboard was tiny though idk wasup there lol. Super nice guy.

Anyways so that's good right? Like did I really just get a badass deal like I think I did? I feel like something supposed to go wrong, like ya'll are gonna say "dude that's what they're worth" or something.

I looked it up and it seems to me it's going for a lot more than that.

LUCKILY I had already bought that PSU and it just so happened to have exactly two 8-pin PCIE power supply connectors I had stuffed back hidden in the case. I wasn't 100% sure that when I got home I was even going to be able to play with it...

Anyways I have to say...the Nvidia software/driver/Cuda Toolkit install was cake man. Everything works the first time, and everything had an appealing look to the graphics etc during the install. The install of everything was real quick.

I cant tell you how many hours I spent uninstalling and reinstall different and/or the SAME drivers over and over for the dinosaur Radeon HD 5670. It's embarrassing, really lol. Tried Ubuntu 14.04, 14.4, 22.04, Server, Desktop, HWE, every driver. Borked my whole system to where I had to reinstall the GRUB probably 20 different times. Windows around a dozen. Dual/Triple booting took a bit for me to learn the hard way how to do it the right way so stuff boots up and works right. Many times I had the flashing cursor on a black screen, or the GRUB rescue menu. When I started tring to get that Radeon working, I had only used linux a total of maybe 10-20 hours my whole life. putting the OS's on the NVME w. a PCIE adapter and running a separate boot partition for Windows/Linux on an old Legacy BIOS is doable and I did it lol. I guess it worked out eh..

Anyways yeah so that happened today... :]

thing is cracking a custom [adjective][noun] 12 character list with a ?d?d?d mask on the end as we speak..

I got some python scripts and a couple programs I made that I will be sharing on here, once I get it ready. I dont want to put it out there quite yet. Mostly to do with stripping down and building wordlists for cracking default router passwords...but they can be used for other purposes, too if you have some info that can narrow down the topic or key types of things the password might include, I suppose. I'm testing them right now. Man this thing is running fast and hot. lotta heat!

On a side note..look at my start time lmao; wth?

Time.Started.....: Fri May 03 06:42:14 2024 (4294967295 years, 364 days)
Time.Estimated...: Fri May 03 17:05:34 2024 (14 hours, 49 mins)

I think my system clock is on drugs ;P

[Chronicus]

btw the benchmark for -m 22000 came in at 970kH/s...but in practice with 17 digests and 14 salts showing in the status, I am guessing its lower. I turned the clocks down a little and maxed the fans in case I get distracted for a while just in case. It was at around 86c at first. I'm not sure what is a "bad" temp boundary on this card..so figured better turn it down a little until I can figure that out.