Whats up with this hardware

[ekingxxx70]

Hello all

I am a newbie to the hashcat world. I am trying to understand what gives the hashcat application the grunt it needs to crack faster. I have tested a simple brute force on 3 different systems. Going by the specs, the estimated time does not make sense.

See attached pictures.

[philsmd]

the mask in the pictures is different, the number of left hashes (but interestingly only one "salt" / network ??? so basically you already cracked all networks on one machine and some hashes are uncrackable because of wrong capture or user sent wrong password ?) in the screenshots are different etc etc etc

it would be more clever to just run a benchmark with
hashcat -m 2500 -b

It would be much more clever to make a fair comparison, instead of comparing apples to oranges.

You also do not show any device (at least not for all screenshots) that hashcat prints at the start of its output. Are the correct drivers installed as recommended on https://hashcat.net/hashcat/

The Nvidia GPU is probably much faster than the Intel GPU, that's not surprising... but for instance the OpenCL drivers for Intel Core and Xeon Processors seem to be not installed. so you are only comparing Nvidia GPU to Intel GPU.
(for the Acer screenshot, I can't really read anything)

BTW: the speed of laptop GPUs is not comparable to a non mobile GPU (in general)... cracking on a laptop is also discouraged because of throttling/airflow/cooling problems. You could destroy the notebook because of bad or missing cooling/fans (several notebooks do not have dedicated cooling solutions / fans for GPUs etc, they often share the same heatsink across CPU and GPU etc).
I'm also wondering if you really should go in the shop and try to install all drivers, hashcat, put a .hccapx file on that notebook for sale etc etc etc... it's neither a good and fair test, nor will the shop owner be very happy (except if you got a permission to do so)

[ekingxxx70]

Mate appreciate the detailed info.

So basically I am trying to crack a wpa file. I have the x1 laptop and my desktop with xeon CPU and a basic 1050ti you.
I tried to crack the wpa but as you can see, it will take a while on these machines.

So tried it on the Acer laptop in a shop with permission. I asked the sales guy to let me run this script that can tell me the true performance of this laptop. Tech sales people, you know how techy an an average tech sales person is.

I even asked some of my mates with games machines with higher GPU such as 1660 or 20xx. Still not much better.

How do I pick my next Machine that can maximize cracking performance? 

Regarding drivers, I am not sure what else to do 

Btw the command I am running is 

hashcat64.exe -m 2500 -a 3 62.hccapx -i ?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a --force 

the mask in the pictures is different, the number of left hashes (but interestingly only one "salt" / network ??? so basically you already cracked all networks on one machine and some hashes are uncrackable because of wrong capture or user sent wrong password ?) in the screenshots are different etc etc etc

it would be more clever to just run a benchmark with
hashcat -m 2500 -b

It would be much more clever to make a fair comparison, instead of comparing apples to oranges.

You also do not show any device (at least not for all screenshots) that hashcat prints at the start of its output. Are the correct drivers installed as recommended on https://hashcat.net/hashcat/

The Nvidia GPU is probably much faster than the Intel GPU, that's not surprising... but for instance the OpenCL drivers for Intel Core and Xeon Processors seem to be not installed. so you are only comparing Nvidia GPU to Intel GPU.
(for the Acer screenshot, I can't really read anything)

BTW: the speed of laptop GPUs is not comparable to a non mobile GPU (in general)... cracking on a laptop is also discouraged because of throttling/airflow/cooling problems. You could destroy the notebook because of bad or missing cooling/fans (several notebooks do not have dedicated cooling solutions / fans for GPUs etc, they often share the same heatsink across CPU and GPU etc).
I'm also wondering if you really should go in the shop and try to install all drivers, hashcat, put a .hccapx file on that notebook for sale etc etc etc... it's neither a good and fair test, nor will the shop owner be very happy (except if you got a permission to do so)

[womble]

How do I pick my next Machine that can maximize cracking performance? 

You buy as much NVidia GPU as you can afford, as much RAM as you have GPU memory, any midrange or better modern CPU, and a motherboard capable of running all of the above. Yes, WPA cracking is slow, because it's a decent design that is deliberately hard to brute force. There is no magic wand that's going to make it super fast. But the more GPU you have, the faster it'll go.

[ekingxxx70]

Thanks, mate

So this is where I am confused. When I compare the Acer laptop with those high specs compared to an older CPU and GPU, it doesn't make sense. Do you reckon it was just a simple driver issue?

How do I pick my next Machine that can maximize cracking performance? 

You buy as much NVidia GPU as you can afford, as much RAM as you have GPU memory, any midrange or better modern CPU, and a motherboard capable of running all of the above.    Yes, WPA cracking is slow, because it's a decent design that is deliberately hard to brute force.  There is no magic wand that's going to make it super fast.  But the more GPU you have, the faster it'll go.