Category: FAQs / What are system and GPU recommendations for Passware Kit?
Our software uses all the available computational resources efficiently: multiple CPUs, NVIDIA and AMD GPUs and multiple computers (Passware Kit Forensic and Passware Kit Business).
GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) cards help accelerate password recovery by up to 400 times, compared to CPU-only systems. To assess your system capabilities for solving password recovery issues use Hardware Benchmark and measure hardware performance on typical password recovery tasks (over a dozen of the most popular file types, such as MS Office, APFS, iTunes backup, RAR, BitLocker, etc.).
Passware supports all types of NVIDIA and AMD GPUs with OpenCL v1.2 and higher. Up to 12 GPUs are supported per host computer (depending on the motherboard). Some old NVIDIA cards might not work, please check our Troubleshooting section for more information.
Hardware acceleration is available for the file if there is a flag "Hardware acceleration possible" in the "File Type" line:
The green "Yes" in the "GPU Support" column in the supported file types list points to the hardware acceleration support.
The password calculation process depends to some extent on the processor speed.
We recommend at least 1 GB RAM for each GPU card.
We have tested Passware Kit on NVIDIA RTX 3090 and AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT to provide you with the recovery speed for several file types. Please check it below:
https://www.passware.com/kit-forensic/performance/
- Cost-efficient hardware:
We recommend using Intel Core i5 processor or similar. The number of cores is more important than its frequency.
We do not recommend anything specific for the motherboard and case, but pay special attention to the cooling system: it should provide a stable GPU temperature during the whole password calculating process. Passware Kit shows the temperature for the GPU cards in the interface and allows setting a max temperature to avoid overheating.
To accelerate the password recovery process, use NVIDIA GeForce RTX and AMD Radeon RX cards. The efficiency of password recovery depends on the number of CUDA cores/.
AMD cards are cheaper than NVIDIA, providing the same or even higher performance. If you use GPU acceleration, pay attention to the corresponding cooling system and power supply unit, depending on the number of GPU cards. For hardware acceleration on some strong file types, it is recommended to have 2 x (RAM + GPUs RAM) of free disk space for paging file. - Maximum performance:
Maximum performance can be achieved by using Distributed Password Recovery. The more Passware Kit Agents you use, the better.- Recommendations for Passware Kit Server:
Intel Core i7 processor or higher. No GPU. Disable the built-in Passware Kit Agent. - Recommendations for Passware Kit Agent:
Intel Core i7 processor, with 4 cores or more. NVIDIA RTX 3090 or AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT for hardware acceleration. Corresponding cooling system. Corresponding power supply unit.
- Recommendations for Passware Kit Server:
View the full list of NVIDIA cards supported
View the full list of AMD cards supported (filtered by Open CL 2.0)