hashcat Forum

I have a new ASUS laptop with a Ryzen 7 processor running Windows 10.  I had previously run hashcat against one of my wireless networks that had a simple password in rockyou.txt - in just seconds the key was found (Fern running in a virtualbox took much longer but also found it).  Then I did another network of my own that has a much more difficult password (The-Distribution-Which-Does-Not-Handle-OpenCL-Well (Kali) Fern didn't find it in rockyou).  So I got the very large dictionary assasin file, unzipped it and copied to the laptop SSD.  The cache build was about 20 minutes.  Windows task manager didn't observe any GPU utilization above 1% but the CPU was working somewhat.  With HWINFO I watched the CPU temp climb and climb and climb towards the sky and hashcat was only about 0.25% done so I aborted rather than risk my new laptop.  I used the "test-disable" option to get around the wrong drivers message for now.  And yes - I know this is a really long running task but I'm just learning as I decided to un-retire.

This is the command I ran:
hashcat64.exe --self-test-disable -m 2500 C:\tocrack\handshakes\WIFIXXXXXX.hccapx C:\tocrack\password-lists\DicAss.v.1.0.txt

I ran the opencl option and got this output:
hashcat (v5.1.0) starting...

OpenCL Info:

Platform ID #1
  Vendor  : NVIDIA Corporation
  Name    : NVIDIA CUDA
  Version : OpenCL 1.2 CUDA 10.2.141

  Device ID #1
    Type          : GPU
    Vendor ID      : 32
    Vendor        : NVIDIA Corporation
    Name          : GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
    Version        : OpenCL 1.2 CUDA
    Processor(s)  : 24
    Clock          : 1590
    Memory        : 1536/6144 MB allocatable
    OpenCL Version : OpenCL C 1.2
    Driver Version : 442.53

Platform ID #2
  Vendor  : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
  Name    : AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing
  Version : OpenCL 2.1 AMD-APP (3004.4)

  Device ID #2
    Type          : GPU
    Vendor ID      : 1
    Vendor        : Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
    Name          : gfx902
    Version        : OpenCL 2.0 AMD-APP (3004.4)
    Processor(s)  : 7
    Clock          : 1600
    Memory        : 4048/6240 MB allocatable
    OpenCL Version : OpenCL C 2.0
    Driver Version : 3004.4 (PAL,HSAIL)

Questions:
Am I going down the right path?
Why did the CPU crank so hard and the GPUs not do anything?
Do I really need to do the manual driver work to clear up the error message (which involves driver fusion and manual dll deletes?  Other thoughts?

Thanks for your help...

the best thing probably would be to not use laptops for these intensive cracking purposes. second thing could be to just use your CPU (install the Intel OpenCL Runtime for Intel Core and Xeon processors, yes this is true even for AMD CPUs). 3rd thing you could try is to use -w 1 to reduce the performance and therefore also the utilization/load/heat.

How do you measure the utilization ? It's very clear to us that the task manager doesn't report the correct Utilization (the windows task manager only works with very few built-in or whitelisted applications, like media players or editing software etc)... you can use something like afterburner or GPU-Z instead to see the GPU utilization... or otherwise just look at the hashcat status prompt (pressing the s key on your keyboard), it has a line mentioning the "Util", it should be 100%.

Yeah, doing intensive and long cracking jobs on a laptop that doesn't have (any at all or sometimes very bad) cooling solutions, is discouraged. Several laptops share the heatsink/cooling system between CPU and GPUs and than they even heat themself up because "connected"/shared.

No more laptop for intensive cracking.

Going to buy this today for about $550 - has some drawbacks like the video card not being the best but I have 3 HP Xeon workstations running 10 Pro that are over 10 years old that I need to replace:
HP Z620 Workstation E5-2660 2.2GHz 8-Cores 32GB DDR3 Quadro 4000 2TB HDD

Interesting information about task manager. I redid a never-used high perf workstation for the photo editing daughter. With load testing TM seemed a little off - perhaps this is why.