R9 270x/GTX960
#1
Hey all, 
Would like to get a rig better suited than my laptop for password cracking, this is mostly a hobby for me, so I'm mostly trying to look at cheaper/good value cards. Any thoughts on cards like the R9 270x and GTX 960? I mention those specific ones because I've seen used ones for pretty cheap on ebay, and price/performance wise they seem quite good. I found some 270x's for around $80-90 which seems to put them at about 1000 WPA2 hashes per second per dollar. 960's seem to be a bit higher performance at a bit higher price, but a similar value. I recall hearing about some issues with those AMD cards on Linux so the 960 might be a better choice overall. 

I can't find any cheap reference cards at this price so that's a downside, but I most likely wouldn't be running this a lot of the time, and even if a card fails it wouldn't be the end of the world since they're cheap. 

Thanks for any advice! Still new to this so if I made any silly assumptions I imagine that would be par for the course.
#2
Hashes per second per dollar is indeed the way to think about it - and if electricity price matters, H/s/watt.

For your use case, non-FE would probably be OK. If you can swing a 970, that might be a nice fit.

My Linux+NVIDIA experience has been pretty solid, and haven't done any AMD.
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