First, Gigabyte suggests GV-N275UD-896H GeForce GTX 275 with special cooling system added. And second news – Thermaltake Technology threw a stylish Massive23 laptop cooler. +25C in Moscow makes us think of a better cooling here as well 🙂

Hardware acceleration of password recovery has been a hot topic for quite some time already. We were the first to adopt widely available graphic cards for this purpose and we’re proud of this. Today I’d like to share some thoughts on hardware acceleration for password recovery, its past, present, and future. I will also cover the most frequently asked questions regarding GPUs.

First of all, sad news: Intel Larrabee is delayed till 2010 (we were expecting it in Q4’2009), according to the reports. With 32 cores onboard (though this number is not confirmed yet), it looks like a very good system for password cracking. Some Larrabee development tools and resources are already available, and of course, we’re porting our code to this platform, and will share the results with you as soon as we’ll be able to (we’re under the NDA with Intel; as well as with Nvidia and AMD :)).

We wrote about Cost-effective video cards recently, but what about better ones, if the prise does not really matter? Just read Best Of The Best: High-End Graphics Card Roundup at Tom’s Hardware. Large. Expensive. Power-consuming. But really fast — so best choice if you deal with GPU acceleration.

Considering a (new) AMD/ATI or NVIDIA video card for password cracking with Wireless Security Auditor or Distributed Password Recovery (to get the most from GPU acceleration technology — at an affordable price)? Read the Best Graphics Cards For The Money: May ’09 at Tom’s Hardware. I especially like the Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart.

Tom’s Hardware has tested two mainstream NVIDIA cards (GeForce 9600 GT and GeForce 9800 GTX) on several CUDA-enabled applications. The applications were:

AMD has hit another megahertz milestone record today. In fact, this is ATI Radeon HD 4890 card, overclocked to 1 GHz at the factory (normally, it runs at 850 MHz); surprisingly, air cooled (I thought that water cooling would be needed).

If you are going to purchase a new computer (or make it yourself), you should definitely think about graphics — for CAD/CAM, gaming, searching for extraterrestrial intelligence at home or password cracking. Of course, thinking of budget, too. I hope you’re already aware of NVIDIA SLI which allows to use multiple video cards, but how a single dual-GPU compares to two single-GPU ones? Read GeForce GTX 295 Vs. GTX 275 SLI: When Two Are Better Than One.

Highly recommended: Burned, Dropped, Drowned: HDD Recovery In Pictures. I hope that you will not encounter into such situations, though :).

Apart from official IT Security events, London ethical hackers like to organize monthly meetings such as DC4420 in clubs, sometimes changing their location. In an informal manner they exchange their experience, represent new ideas and technologies.