What kind of video cards and computers does the white house use.

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Beasy89

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 23, 2009
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They must have some pretty high tech gearz at the whites house no? Probably Quad Cores and super computers setups? Any white house correspondents from the hardfourums that can comments on these?
 
The Washington Post reported on this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/21/AR2009012104249.html

The most memorable quote being:

"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.
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I doubt you'd find so much as a dual-core in the White House. The article implies that the lucky ones have a machine running WinXP. The NSA would presumably have vast farms of CPUs somewhere, but not in the White House. Video cards? What, you think they have time to play games there?
 
It still is government, you would be real lucky to find anything faster that a PIII with 256mb of RAM. They average about 7 years behind on technology.
 
We have E6400s in the city council office computers I intern at. I've checked.

Graphics cards? Hah, in your dreams, these are office computers. You want graphics cards, you go across the corridor where all the Mac Pros of the graphics division are at.
 
caniba said:
It still is government, you would be real lucky to find anything faster that a PIII with 256mb of RAM. They average about 7 years behind on technology.
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I don't know about that. I'm sure DOD has some crazy off the wall tech that no one here has ever heard of....some of dat classified, specialized, and top secrets tech we never hearb of.
 
I was pretty surprised after reading that article up there. I always thought they would be up-to-date with all the current tech in the White House, considering that the decisions made in there ultimately effect the nation as a whole. You'd think they have better systems running in there.

The CIA, FBI, and other intelligence agencies probably pack some crazy machines, though.
 
I will bet money that in some parts of the white house, some of them use quads.
 
What would they need beacoup computing power for inside a bunch of offices where the most intensive tasks performed are usually a secretary taking dictation or someone spending hours online doing research? Personally I'd hope the money (and maintenance/upgrade time) is better spent elsewhere. I do hope they have good firewalls and backup routines though! :p
 
I can say that the VA just started getting dual core Intel and AMD systems but still 98 on the oldest along with XP and in the Airforce we have a few tri core phenoms and C2D along with XP and vista in testing. video cards are nothing special unless its a cad machine.

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Some parts of the government have good computers. The ones that need it mostly...

Someone who just types up reports or something like that? Crappy Pentium III, maybe a Pentium 4. That's how office situations usually work. Get a bunch of computers and then bleed em dry. Which means no new computers for a looong time.

At my job (which is, granted, not government) I have been rocking a Pentium III based Celeron for almost 2 years until it finally died, which was good for me because it meant I got a brand new Athlon X2 Dell.
 
my cousin works in s. korea doing satillite communication and battle communication for the army.. in there they just barely got dual core's about 3 months ago.. up til then they were running off 2.6ghz p4's..

he says everything is ancient.. but they stick with the old stuff becauses its reliable and everyone knows the technology.. military and government hate change when it comes to technology because then they have to relearn everything on the tech side.. but the DOD and NSA use super computers and either work stations or low end systems tied into the main super computer.. easier to keep track of what people are doing.. and so all the information is recorded on a single system instead of spreading it out... also if you watch 24.. and saw the server rack thats used in the FBI office.. think 2-3 times bigger.. then you have the real FBI main frame..

now id really like to know what they use in the white house command center used to communicate with all the branches of the military..
 
If you're talking about desktop computers (not laptops) for-profit companies (meaning larger budgets without all of this "taxpayers money" crap) can easily go 5 years between "PC Refresh".

Why do many of you think that office jobs (even the White House is an office job) need to refresh their PCs so often?

If you just did Outlook, IE, Excel and Word, how often would YOU need a new PC? They certainly aren't playing games, rendering video, Folding@Home or any of the other myriad of reasons you justify new toys to yourselves. It has more to do with that than with being "scared" of something newer than a P3.
 
Pentagon is always many years behind on consumer technology (Intel, ATi, etc..)

It because these chips are developed out of country - and they always have to worry about security. I think it takes several years of scrutiny before it gets a DoD approval if its not completely made in house (country). And nothing is totally made in the US anymore, especially high end computing.

I think they are still at original pentium-90 or even 486 as the last chip that they verfied has no security "anomalies" in them. Three years ago, I remember someone sent up a $500 million satellite, with a specialized 486 chip in it (for security reasons)

Many server boards use the RageXL (mid 1990s) as the videocard because its the only one that is verified to have no security issues, and is approved by the US govt for use with anything.
 
I think you guys would be disappointed to know what most government systems are like. I have a friend who used to work at the CIA and one who works at the NSA, and often times their systems are actually somewhat old.

There is a reason for this: their #1 concern is not raw performance, but security. Every single system, protocol, program, etc that is used has to be rigorously certified to meet security standards. That's why they still use those ancient "secure phones" from like the 80's.
 
Eva_Unit_0 said:
I think you guys would be disappointed to know what most government systems are like. I have a friend who used to work at the CIA and one who works at the NSA, and often times their systems are actually somewhat old.

There is a reason for this: their #1 concern is not raw performance, but security. Every single system, protocol, program, etc that is used has to be rigorously certified to meet security standards. That's why they still use those ancient "secure phones" from like the 80's.
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Yup. Most people in the government/White House aren't using intensive programs on a daily basis, so why spend money on new tech? It doesn't make a difference really, and those who do need quality hardware obviously have it.

It's like if you work at a telemarketing place, some of them have ancient computers running in DOS and shit. Whatever gets the job done.
 
they need the best video cards out there man!
they gotta watch "Independence Day" so they'll know what to do, just in case aliens come. LOL
 
What about for black ops missions, they use computers with gps right so it have to be quad or duals onlys cards?
 
What about for black ops missions, they use computers with gps right so it have to be quad or duals onlys cards?
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Only when they're providing Intel for Sam Fisher. I happen to work in the White House, and I can guarantee that he's an actual government employee. No joke.
 
I don't think they need fast computers at The White House because all they probably use them for is sending email and a bit of web browsing. A 486 would do them. Who knows though, I could see Obama being a PC gamer.
 
Klob said:
I don't think they need fast computers at The White House because all they probably use them for is sending email and a bit of web browsing. A 486 would do them. Who knows though, I could see Obama being a PC gamer.
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When's the last time you tried to surf the web on a 486? Extremely painful nowadays.
 
Klob said:
I don't think they need fast computers at The White House because all they probably use them for is sending email and a bit of web browsing. A 486 would do them. Who knows though, I could see Obama being a PC gamer.
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obama play basketballs not games.
 
GreenGoose said:
When's the last time you tried to surf the web on a 486? Extremely painful nowadays.
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Yeah I doubt you could go that ancient and maintain a minimum level of usability, even for basic office tasks... It's not like you can expect them to trade documents made on Wordperfect for DOS when everyone else is using MS Office. :p But something pretty darn old but just a lil' more recently is probably do-able... Any late Pentium 3 or newer will run XP decent enough and surf the web just fine provided it's got like half a gig ofr ram.

That's for people who just surf the web at the office but also need access to a standard office suite and PDFs, etc... We all know people tasked with more specialized stuff (bank tellers, telemarketing, recepcionists,etc.) who run one app and do one specific job only can certainly get away with stuff much more ancient as they're often running some legacy apps from ages ago.
 
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