A recent photo of Elon Musk’s DOGE gaming PC at the White House is raising eyebrows. Tech reporter Kate Conger of the New York Times (h/t Polygon) shared an image of what appears to be a rather unbalanced RGB-infused build installed in the Secretary of War Suite in the Eisenhower Building.
Pixel peeping suggests that the tower system features a compact MSI-branded GPU, likely to be an RTX 4060 or 4070 model. Yet this Wi-Fi-connected PC is hooked up to a 49-inch Samsung Odyssey G9 dual-QHD display. Some might say this is a bit like putting a lawn mower engine in a muscle car.
We don’t want to throw shade at the popular RTX 4060, or even 4070, though. Actually, these are looking like increasingly decent choices – at the right price – given the recent RTX 50 family reviews and the direction ‘Lackwell’ releases seem to be determined to follow. Rather, it is the incongruity of the richest man in the world’s gaming PC that tickles our PC DIY spider-senses. This machine has over 7.3 million pixels to push at native full-screen gaming (Samsung’s monitor packs in 5120 x 1440 pixels) and its duties as ‘the chainsaw for bureaucracy,’ so shouldn’t it be a bit beefier?
Only yesterday, we published our in-depth RTX 5070 review. This new Nvidia card represents a step up from the RTX 4070-at-best DOGE PC. We didn’t test the new RTX 5070 at 4K (about 8.3 million pixels), though, as we judged QHD (2560 x 1440) to be the performance/quality sweet spot in modern titles.
Of course, we don’t know how Musk uses this White House-situated PC to play games. He might play in windowed mode, with half of the screen dedicated to gaming, with the other featuring feeds relevant to DOGE operations – that would mean less strain on the GPU. Moreover, various reports suggest Musk favors a number of less hardware-intensive titles, like the titles he is known to play frequently, such as Diablo IV and Path of Exile 2. On the other hand, the special government employee is also known to have at least dabbled in Cyberpunk 2077, which can be very demanding at its highest quality settings.
