Password Cracker - Enterprise Constraints

[pentet]

I work for a large Fortune 100 company that has recently invested a TON of money into beefing up its security function.  As such, I was brought on to be a lead member in the penetration testing team.  Amongst the many capabilities we are asked to have, password cracking is one.  Performing similar functions at other companies, we were given free rein to procure the pieces and parts necessary to build the ultimate cracking machine.  This new company does (as I’ve been told) ‘millions of dollars a year with HP’, and as such are requiring us to buy all of our hardware from them due to existing negotiations over support and pricing.  While this wasn’t ideal, I figured I could at the very least mix and match hardware from the enterprise and consumer lines to still build something solid enough.  In my most recent conversation, I was told that HP’s Enterprise and consumer lines are completely separate, and that all hardware must be from the enterprise offerings and be ordered to usable spec.  Once again, not the answer I wanted.  I need to get a proposal together very soon to build the best password cracker I can from the options provided, but these all being enterprise-grade cards I honestly have very little data from which to research. I am hoping the experts on these forums (yeah, I’m looking to guys like you epixoip for help) can help me put together the best rig from my options.  Then maybe, someday, I can convince the higher-ups to let me swap out these high-cost low performance cards for the much more logical low-cost, high performance consumer cards.  Here are my options and the number of cards the boxes can support (please refrain from negative commentary -- i know they are great cards if I were an actuary, haha).  I really appreciate everyone’s input!
 
NVIDIA Tesla K40 Workstation Coprocessor

2

NVIDIA Quadro M6000 12GB Graphics

2

AMD FirePro W7100 8GB Graphics

2

NVIDIA Quadro K6000 12GB Graphics

2

NVIDIA Quadro K5200 8GB Graphics

3

NVIDIA Quadro K4200 4GB Graphics

2

NVIDIA Quadro M5000 8GB Graphics

3

NVIDIA Quadro M4000 8GB Graphics

3

NVIDIA Quadro K2200 4GB Graphics

2

AMD FirePro W5100 4GB Graphics

2

AMD FirePro W2100 2GB Graphics

2

NVIDIA Quadro K620 2GB Graphics

2

NVIDIA Quadro K420 2GB Graphics

2

NVIDIA Quadro K420 1GB Graphics

2

[coolbry95]

I am pretty sure that your best bet is going to be the AMD FirePro W1700. You seem like you did your research before. The reason I say the AMD card is due to the NVIDIA ones not having the Maxwell architecture. That makes the NVIDIA cards you can get not very good. Also the enterprise cards or whatever you call them are almost the same as the consumer grade cards.

I suppose you already know but you buy a complete rig with support or if you still need/want to do it yourself go with NVIDIA 900 series cards because they have Maxwell.

I am sure someone will correct me if I am wrong.

[Lars]

The Quadro M6000 is just a more expensive Titan X, so I'd go with those.

[epixoip]

I concur, out of that list Quadro M6000 is your best bet. Kind of a shitty situation though. You could get 4x Titan X for the price of that card

[pentet]

Thanks, guys.  I appreciate the insight.  Word on the street is that the Quadro is underclocked (at least compared to the Titan X).  Can anyone confirm or deny that, and if so, can you speak to how underclocked they are relatively (e.g., 90%, 80%)

[rico]

Not sure what the clock speed is on the M6000 but its official Memory Bandwidth speed of 317 GB/s is 94.2% of the Titan X's 336.5 GB/s. I'd guess the difference is directly connected with the clock speed difference.

[epixoip]

Yes, the Quadro is underclocked -- that's what Quadro and Tesla cards are, underclocked versions of the GTX cards. But it doesn't matter, you can simply push the clocks up.

[pentet]

Yes, the Quadro is underclocked -- that's what Quadro and Tesla cards are, underclocked versions of the GTX cards. But it doesn't matter, you can simply push the clocks up.

Okay, cool.  Good info.  So, if I am reading this correctly, I should be able to get the high performance I desire, I'm just paying a laughable price to get there...?

[epixoip]

Correct.