Introduction

If you are planning to create a cracking rig for research purposes check out GPU hashcat benchmark table below.

We tested hashcat against a lot of GPUs. We found that some old GPU (and cheap) give awesome results, at the cost of more power hungry GPU.

In particular, we recommend buying AMD 7950 or R9 280 or better. We found those model very cheap. To lower the power consumption we modified the bios to lower the GPU core speed. After some experience with mining, we found that lowering the core speed by 20% didn't have a big impact on hashrate and also lowered the wattage a lot ( we got 175w per card with 7950 instead 250w).

If you are going to build a linux machine and use AMD card, be worry about driver configuration!. Nvidia card are easy to configure in Linux. If you are going the windows path, don't worry about AMD. Our setup uses R9 280x with four gpu using pci risers (1x to 16x), very similar to zcash mining rig configs. In particular, we used Linux and we were able to configure the GPU, but it took us several days to make it work (we had to patch amd driver to work with kernel 4).

However, if you are willing to invest we recommend buying the Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti which provides 576000 hash/s!

The hashcat GPU benchmark comparison table

Below we show you the table to compare hash rate. We choose two algorithms MD4 and WPA2 (WPA-EAPOL-PBKDF2) to make the table small.

WPA2 hashcat benchmarking