Am I doing something wrong to cause this poor performance?

Hello all,

     I'm new to the forum and hashcat in general, but I've been experimenting and learning over the past few weeks and I'm trying to determine if I'm getting the most performance out of my cards with the way I'm using hashcat.

I have two nvidia (evga) gtx 970's (not bridged together) running hashcat as such:

cudaHashcat64.bin --status -a 3 -w 3 -m 11300 ../test.hash ?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a

Here are the stats:

motherboard: asrock extreme4 970
psu: corsair 750w
video card: nvidia gtx 970 (x2)
memory: pny 8 gig ddr3 1866mhz
hard disk: western digital sata


Session.Name...: cudaHashcat
Status.........: Running
Input.Mode.....: Mask (?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a?a) [11]
Hash.Target....: $bitcoin$96$ab76d8cbdb7c65e16048847acc67c...
Hash.Type......: Bitcoin/Litecoin wallet.dat
Time.Started...: Thu May  5 07:06:52 2016 (1 hour, 16 mins)
Time.Estimated.: > 10 Years
Speed.GPU.#1...:        0 H/s
Speed.GPU.#2...:        0 H/s
Speed.GPU.#*...:        0 H/s
Recovered......: 0/1 (0.00%) Digests, 0/1 (0.00%) Salts
Progress.......: 24041472/6403748062057711647 (0.00%)
Rejected.......: 0/24041472 (0.00%)
Restore.Point..: 79872/67407874337449596 (0.00%)
HWMon.GPU.#1...: 99% Util, 76c Temp, 39% Fan
HWMon.GPU.#2...: 99% Util, 71c Temp, 27% Fan

In the start, Progress was showing about 1 million per second.  Now it's at around 200k per 10 seconds or so in terms of that number increment.

Any guidance would be appreciated.  I set the password on this to 'testing123' to see how effective the mask attack would be and how long it would take to recover.

     Best,

MP