Buying a new machine for Hashcat

[squ1zzy]

I would like to thank everyone for this great community. I've been reading a lot on the forum and there's so much useful information. Since I want to build a machine for Hashcat only, I would like to ask if I'm doing it correctly.

I'm working as a pentester which, few times a month, finds a hashed password like NTLM, IPMI etc. Since we know say to customers "It can be cracked with the right hardware and time" we want to say "This is the plain-text password".

Because of this I want to build a rig with Hashview which will be made "public" to our company. Since this is a prove of concept to see if everything is working, I want to build a rig which can be expanded in the future.

For now I'm looking for a single GPU based rig and was looking at the following hardware:

- NVIDIA GTX1080 Ti Founders Edition
- ASUS Rampage Extreme IV
- Intel i7 3820
- Corsair HX1200 V2

The i7 is maybe overkill, but I can get it for a good price including the Rampage mainboard. The 1200WATT PSU is for future expansion (max 4x GTX1080TI Founders Edition). The Rampage Extreme IV can hold 4x 16 PCI-e max.

I'm not sure about memory, but I guess the speed doesn't matter that much unless it's matched to the CPU? I guess 16GB will do?

What do you guys think? I've also read that NVIDIA will come with a new GPU, but I can't wait for this. Even if it's released the miners will probably make it hard to get.

[undeath]

Unless you need the CPU for other related means, eg wordlist processing, or you anticipate you need to crack GPU-hard algorithms like scrypt you don't need a fast CPU. If you can get it really cheap it won't hurt of course.

hashcat assumes you have at least 2GB RAM per ocl device. 16GB for four GPUs is okay. GTX1080Ti FE is a good decision.

[squ1zzy]

Thank you for the fast reply.

Any thought about the MB? 2066 socket MB is only for high-end CPU's which I'm guessing I'm not using anyway. We do use wordlists, but not intensively. And prices of socket 2066 CPU's are quiet high if not needed

I've calculated 300WATT per GPU so I guess with 4x a GTX1080 I need more power, but for now it will do.

[soxrok2212]

Typically, it is recommended to match the amount of computer ram with your GPU VRAM. So for every 1080 Ti you get, you should have 11GB of RAM. In all honesty, I don’t think it is actually a requirement, and 16GB would probably do just fine.

Also note: a 1080 Ti can reach 300W per card. That said, it’s a good idea to add 50-100W of headroom per card. Not good to run your PSU at max capacity 24/7. Something like a 1600W might be better, depending on the rest of your hardware.