We have the cards, now what?

[cybhashcat]

As simple and as short as possible, in order to get the maximum out of our 4x1070 FE cards, which:
Motherboard (how many PCI x16/x8) to get?
CPU (minimum cores/gen?) Xeon/I7?

And in case we use a server, we got this offer:
1 x Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2609 v4 
8 x 16GB DDR4 1.2V-2400
1 x 800GB SSD
3 x HGST 6TB 3.5-inch 7200 SATA
4 x GeForce GTX 1070 FE

Thank you!

[atom]

https://hashcat.net/wiki/doku.php?id=fre...king_speed

[epixoip]

You said you bought 4x 1070 FE, but the GPUs you listed at the bottom of your post are not FE. Moreover I don't see any justification for putting 128 GB of RAM into a quad-GPU system. And I also see no reason to use such an underpowered CPU, or 6 TB of storage for that matter. So the configuration you posted makes practically no sense at all.

[kiara]

4 x Gainward GeForce GTX 1070 Phoenix 8GB GDDR5 PCIE 3.0 x16

Thank you!

this is how an FE should be looking

[cybhashcat]

Yes i know the cards don't match, this was just a sales pitch.
we bought FE cards, but we asked them to exclude them since we already have them.
sorry for causing so much confusing.

my questions, besides that little mess up are still relevant, i hope.

Motherboard (how many PCI x16/x8) to get?
CPU (minimum cores/gen?) Xeon/I7?

epixoip, before showing the config which we were offered i asked the above, so regarding what you said:

You said you bought 4x 1070 FE, but the GPUs you listed at the bottom of your post are not FE. Moreover I don't see any justification for putting 128 GB of RAM into a quad-GPU system. And I also see no reason to use such an underpowered CPU, or 6 TB of storage for that matter. So the configuration you posted makes practically no sense at all.

We don't know much about this, we just know that we want to be able to crack hashes faster, so after some research we decided on 4xFE 1070s. While i ask here about the CPU and MOBO requirments, my bosses are trying to get offers from people, that is why i posted this build.

please tell me, what is a decent, powerful (not underpowered) CPU that will fully utilize our GPUs, and if there is a minimal requirement from the Mobo (such as the PCI slots, which Dateline solved for me) or any other component, please mention that as well.


Thank you!

[epixoip]

If you're going to get quotes for a professionally-built system, it might behoove you to get a quote from a company that actually sells password cracking rigs, instead of from companies that just build computers and will throw a bunch of random GPUs into a poorly-matched rig all willy-nilly.

CPU matters because hashcat can use CPU + GPU cooperatively now, and CPUs with AVX2 and lots of cores are fast enough to provide a decent bump in performance (example, https://twitter.com/jmgosney/status/692124581692358657)

The general rule of thumb for RAM is RAM==VRAM. 4x 1070 FE is 32GB of VRAM, so 32GB of host RAM would be appropriate. This is not to improve performance, but to ensure you have enough memory available to allocate buffers when working with large hash lists, otherwise you run the risk of encountering CL_OUT_OF_HOST_MEMORY errors. Doubling this figure isn't a bad idea to give you some additional memory for e.g. wordlist manipulation, but 4x or more is senseless unless you actually have a valid reason for doing so.

You also likely won't use very much disk space. If you actually have terabytes of wordlists, you're doing something very wrong. A 500GB SDD is *plenty* of storage for a password cracking rig, far more than you'll ever need. You actually could likely get by with just a 128GB SSD, but there's not much of a price difference to justify going with such a small drive.