PSU recommendation for hypothetical system

[Nullvoid]

If someone came to you with a system specced roughly as follows:

Case: Cooler Master Stacker 830 Black
Motherboard: intel D975XBX2 (Bad Axe 2) or Nvidia 680i SLI board
Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700, Core 2 Extreme X6800, or Core 2 Duo X6600
Processor Cooler: Arctic Freezer 7 Cooler Pro or Sythe Ninja with 120mm sharkoon Silent Eagle 1000 fan
RAM 2Gb: G.Skill DDR2 1000 PC2-8000 or Corsair TwinX DDR2 XMS2 Dominator PC8500
Graphics cards: Nvidia GeForce 8800 x2 SLI
Graphics Coolers: ?
Sound Card: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme
Hard Drive 1: 150 Gb Western Digital WD1500ADFD Raptor
Hard Drive 2: Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB or Samsung SpinPoint T HD401LJ 400gb
Hard Drive Coolers/Silencers: Sythe Silent Box x2
Optical Drive 1: Samsung WriteMaster SH-W163 or Pioneer DVR-111BK
Optical Drive 2: Samsung WriteMaster SH-W163 or Pioneer DVR-111BK
Cooling: T-Balancer Big NG Controller linked to 2-5 fans. Either Revoltec Fan UV Dark Blue 120mm, or sharkoon Silent Eagle 1000 120mm

What would you consider as a bare minimum in terms of psu? I realise since the geforce8800's aren't available it is a bit of a guessing game, but your input would be appreciated. The guy himself has specced either a fsp epsilon 700w or an enermax galaxy 850w btw.

[Hutch]

the fsp epsilon would absolutely not work, unless they are lieing about the quad rails, it doesn't have enough individual power to each rail. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but from what I see it has a max of 15amps on each 12v rail. The Q6700 uses about 230-250w stock. The cpu rail needs atleast 20amps to run a Q6700. Each 8800 (assuming the GTX) uses as much or more power than that I believe. At minimum he's going to need 60 amps on the 12v rail alone.

Enermax Galaxy 850W would probably do the trick, however.

[Bbq]

Sources? I doubt ANY cpu would use 20 amps.

Hutch, the Enermax Galaxy most likely not work either, since the current limiters on the rails aren't that high either. Not to mention it's about $100 more than the OCZ GXS 700.

Since I don't know the exact wattage and amps of an 8800, I'm going to refrain from suggesting. Since we don't know what the amps the card takes in exactly, I think it's safe to say, a power supply with a single massive rail should do it without a problem. Maybe a PCP&C silencer 750, the 1KW single-rail?

[Hutch]

My mistake, I had remembered reading an article on tomshardware last week on the quad core cpus. They had a page on the power output. Being very vague, they said the total output was 235 under full load. But that was worth a small HD and an ati x300 (probably putting out 30-40w total between those two components.)

I did read however that the 8800GTX will put out between 230-300W of power. Nvidia said they likely have a recommendation of a minimum 850W PSU, which means absolutely nothing because they aren't specifying how much the 12v needs.

Eitherway you're going to be needing a really expensive, powerful PSU.

I'll do a little more research for you. Also kind of need to wait a little while for nvidia to give some more details on the exact output of the 8800's.

[Nullvoid]

Cheers for the responses guys. Would that figure of 230-300w for the 8800gtx be inclusive of the 75w provided by the motherboard or?

I guess the question was a bit premature since things are so up in the air at the moment concerning the exact specs of these new gpus.

[madmat]

Some wattage will come from the mobo but most will come through the PCI-e connectors but I really doubt the whole 230W claims. I'd figure that any PSU rated for quad SLI with a PCI-e connector on it's own rail would do the GT version with no issues.

As to ther GTX, I could see it being problematic since it requires 2 X PCI-e connectors per card. For that you'd have to use splitters and apart from low draw items tend to avoid splitters like the plauge.