Tests show $30,000 AI GPUs are terrible password crackers — RTX 5090 gaming GPU outperforms Nvidia H200 and AMD MI300X

Nvidia's flagship data center GPU, the H200, loses a crucial security benchmark to a $30,000 gaming card, raising uncomfortable questions about how billions in AI infrastructure spending translates to real-world performance. The finding reveals that specialized hardware optimizations for training language models may actually handicap these chips at other computational tasks, suggesting enterprises could be vastly overpaying for capabilities they don't need. Security researchers testing password cracking—a metric that mirrors many cryptographic workloads—found the consumer-grade RTX 5090 dramatically outpaced chips costing three times as much, a result that could reshape how companies think about GPU procurement.

Tom's Hardware·Apr 11