In February 2017, I co-authored a blog detailing our build of an 8-GPU password cracker. Over the past 8 years, it’s had millions of views and thousands of comments. To all the concerned writers, nothing has melted down and we continue to run 2 nearly identical 8-GPU crackers today. Both are currently running 8 NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti cards.
We also got our hands on one of NVIDIA’s latest cards! We missed the October 12th launch by 9 days but finally found an overclocked Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4090 GAMING OC 24G for sale locally.
Our Goals:
- Benchmark NTLM hash cracking performance and compare it to our current RTX 3090 and GTX 1080Ti cards
- Based on the 4090’s cracking performance, design a new “Kracken4” cracking rig
- Utilize individual 4090 cards for quick local password cracking
- Stay tuned for a future article on our monster RTX 4090 Kracken4 build!!
For our unscientific analysis, we used Hashcat’s NTLM (-m 1000) benchmark (-b) to test our 2 current model cards and the new RTX 4090. This included the NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti, NVIDIA RTX 3090, and NVIDIA RTX 4090.
When attempting to crack a single NTLM hash using an 8-character brute force crack, the actual average performance was closer to 225 GH/s. Without any tuning and using the latest NVIDIA driver for Windows, the RTX 4090 could brute any 8-character password in approximately 8 hours!
Screenshot of a single NTLM hash crack job running an 8-character brute force attack.
Our early testing shows that the NVIDIA RTX 4090 is a strong contender for high-performance password hash cracking. Despite running the RTX 4090 right out of the box without any tuning on a Windows 11 desktop computer, the cracking performance is amazing. When compared to our current cracking rigs with 8 GTX 1080Ti cards, a single RTX 4090 is roughly 48% as powerful. That makes the RTX 4090 almost 4x faster than the GTX 1080Ti. Stay tuned as we figure out how many 4090’s we can get our hands on and combine into a single cracking rig.
Interested in learning more about SynerComm’s password cracking services? Check out this page!
