hashcat Forum

Hi, I'm looking to eventually purchase an open-air GPU rig which will have 5 GPUs; potentially 6 with a future upgrade.

I've wrote down a list of parts which I've researched about, but for all I know they could be bad performance with hashcat.

I'm unsure whether the CPU and RAM speed would bottleneck hashcat, I've read into x1 vs x16 and saw some forum posts on here
and it seems the performance difference isn't a lot, so x1 is fine for me (once again, I may be wrong).

Gigabyte GA-H110-D3A
Intel Celeron G3930 (with stock cooler)
1x GTX 1080
2x GTX 1080ti
2x GTX 3070 or 3080
128GB M.2 SSD
2 x 8GB DDR4-2400 MHZ Ram (max speed mobo can support).
Windows 10
2 x 1200w PSUs


Any help / advice is greatly appreciated, budget isn't an issue to be honest, but I'm kinda wanting to cheap out on it (if I'm able too) due to it solely being for Hashcat.

Have a look at this guide, it was written by epixoip (Founder of terahash) for this year's DEF CON: https://passwordvillage.org/hardware.html#rig_setup

After you read through, you might want to reconsider some choices you made here.

If not, there are some things you might you want to consider, when going such a configuration. I especially discourage cheaping out on mobo/cpu/ram. An open frame might be only way to keep 3080/3070 FE Cards cool, so this is reasonable I think. You have to consider room temperature in this case though, especially for long cracking jobs.

(09-21-2020, 01:32 PM)NoReply Wrote: [ -> ]Have a look at this guide, it was written by epixoip (Founder of terahash) for this year's DEF CON: https://passwordvillage.org/hardware.html#rig_setup

After you read through, you might want to reconsider some choices you made here.

If not, there are some things you might you want to consider, when going such a configuration. I especially discourage cheaping out on mobo/cpu/ram. An open frame might be only way to keep 3080/3070 FE Cards cool, so this is reasonable I think. You have to consider room temperature in this case though, especially for long cracking jobs.

Thanks, now I'm depressed after reading this xD.

But in seriousness, thanks. It's made me reconsider my options a good amount. Although I've rented machines with 32GB/16GB RAM with 8x1080ti, and had no issues with: CL_OUT_OF_HOST_MEMORY ever. So I didn't think I'd need 64GB of RAM

As the guide says, memory usage heavily depends on the type of attack you are performing. Actually the rule of thumb around here always was RAM >= total VRAM, not double, but I guess there is reason, why the guide says RAM >= 2 x total VRAM by now. Anyways, it should be fine to stick to the old rule, as long as you maintain the option to upgrade your RAM once you encounter such an error.

Feel free to post your reconsidered options, in case you are in doubt about anything.