8800 GT & cudaHashcat-plus

Hi,
sorry for this newbie msg , but I'm somehow bloqued by "where do I start reading the doc".

my configuration is :
- dell optiplex 790 (no choice)
- i7-2600 3.40G (no choice)
- kali linux 64b (its a choice
- Gforce 8800 GT (no choice)

do you think w7-64 bits is a better option ?

I'm quite confused with the 'mask' attacks (on a net ntlmv2.. ;-) :
- some of the options I've tried 'exhausted' the cudaHashcat-plus.bin process (too specific mask : e.g. "-t 8 -a 3 -n 80 -u512 ... -1 ?u?l?l -2 ?d?d?d ?1?2?1?2");
- some of the options I've tried made an Error 700 'cuMemcpyDtoh' (" -t 32 -a 3 n -160 -u 1024 ..");

So my questions are .. :
- any reference to start with ? and perhaps with exhaustive masks explanations
- what would be the limitation of a Geforce 8800 GT ? (it looks like it have 112 cores - but is quite old)

thanks a lot for reading!