some hardware questions for building a new rig

[des56]

Have been reading several threads, and my understanding is that the GTX 1080Ti is the card to buy. And the Founders Edition has better performance, see GTX 1080 FE vs GTX 1080 Ti FE topic.
Thinking about buying 2. Will mainly use them for cracking NTLM/netNTLM/WPA2.

• Any particular GTX 1080Ti brand that is recommended or brands that I should avoid ?
  
• OS will be Linux,  should I go for Ubuntu 14.04 or 16.04 LTS or another distro?
  
• How important is storage? Is an SSD a must have?
  
• Is 32 GB RAM enough? Or can I expect higher speeds with more?
  

Thanks

[Kryczek]

You need Founders Edition cards, which unfortunately seem to be out of stock everywhere at the moment.

Even though 1080TI-FE cards are sold under a variety of brands (NVIDIA itself, EVGA, ASUS, etc) they are supposed to be exactly the same: the partners either get the GPU chip from NVIDIA and build the PCB around it by strictly following NVIDIA blueprints, or ready-to-use cards that they just package with their branding.

The only reasons left to prefer a brand over another is differences in warranty, RMA and each partner's own touch like step-up program (see EVGA) or freebies.

Ubuntu should be fine. Not sure why you would use 14.04 though: just choose between the current LTS or the very latest release

I wouldn't call SSD a must have, and 32GB should be plenty; buy what makes you happy at the moment, you can always add faster storage and/or more RAM later when you have a better idea of what you need depending on your style of password cracking.

[des56]

Thanks Kryczek!

Yeah, I saw that the FE is the best one, but hard to get.

Wanted to use the latest Ubuntu LTS, but I saw that Brutalis was using 14.04, so I was wondering if there was any reason to use the older version.

[undeath]

The software shipped with Brutalis, Hashstack, has some limitations which is why it's still using 14.04. (a new version is already available internally afaik)

There is no good reason to use such an old OS.

[epixoip]

Correct. Legacy Hashstack is tied to upstart plus some other things specific to Ubuntu 14.04. Hashstack Pro will officially ship on 16.04.