DescentBB

What size PSU would I need for a system with a Core 2 Duo E6600 sequence CPU (most likely Core 2 Quad) and a GeForce 8800 GTX video card?

It could probably be done on 400 watts easily. 500 if you want to play it safe or overclock a bit.

500W+ should be fine. Make sure it's at least ATX 2.2 up.

If you plan on getting SLI with that, change the spec to 700-800 watts though.

Remember that it also depends how many drives you have as well. 2 HD's and a 2 optical drives, with the other stuff you have listed, you'll want a 500 at least.

I run a overclocked CPU, a overclocked GPU, two optical drives, and three hard drives on a 530 watt PSU along with 10 fans and it doesn't even blow warm air out the back of the PSU. My average system draw according to the battery backup monitoring software is around 250 watts loaded. And that is including networking equipment, dsl modems and usb mouse chargers. Total even with the monitors is less then 500 watts.

Have a look at the power consumption listed in this article, especially the Intel system: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/sh ... =2879&p=13
A Core 2 Extreme QX6700 CPU (quad core) with a 8800 GTX under load was pulling only 263 watts at the outlet, you can get away with a 400 watt PSU on that no problem. The load power of the AMD system is exactly why AMD doesn't have native quad cores available in their current manufacturing process.