Password Cracker Update

It's been quite some time that 6 character password haven't been safe. Here's why!

AMD's recently release RX 6800 XT. This is the latest GPU monster to hit the street and it's right up there in performance, more or less topping performance charts all over the net. Performance comes at a price however (and I don't mean dollars) don't even plug this guy in if you don't have a minimum 700 watt power supply.

Needless to say the number of transistors (does anyone even measure that anymore?) is even more astonishing that the previous models. It has 4608 shading units and 72 compute units.

Oh, and did I mention 16GB ram ? It's almost the tail wagging the dog now. The motherboard should probably be the GPU and the PCI auxiliary processor should be the CPU.

The basis of this build is the old XEON (1245) PC with its meagre 32GB which found a home in Bill's home theatre room. It has migrated from the old mini ITX case the a full sized tower which was needed just to hold the full length double width card. Bill took the old PC on to help out with some game software development on the side. To cut a long story short, AMD has seen the value of the software development work and so provided some hardware to help out...... So this isn't a password cracker at all, but it could easily be.

These two images give an idea as to how much power is packed in to the latest generation GPUs.

Now

Before (this is an actual password cracker - it became famous for cracking any Windows password in under 6 hours).

Right now it's actually quite difficult to get your hands on one of the RX 6800 XT units because it's currently the darling of the crypto world. It does such a good job of computing cryptocurrency hashes that miners are buying them in vast quantities.

Providing a home for a full length graphics card meant some fundamental changes to the build. To start with the power supply had to be upgraded to handle the RX 6800 XT going from 550 watts to a Coolmaster V850 850 watt unit. The size increase in the PSU and the length of the GPU card mandated a change of case too. The previous mini ITX case gave way to a largely empty full size tower.

And as much as I later wanted to include LED full color blingage it was overlooked. The new case has a glass side which has become more or less standard for this type of build now. Although I can't really see office/development machines going for it yet, but then again, now that everyone works from home in these covid times perhaps these will ultimately get color LED bling too.