Can a Steel Series Siberia headset run from the mobo with full surround?

I have the Asus Crosshair V Formula mobo and I use a Steel Series Siberia full-size headset with USB soundcard.

I have found the audio to be really good when using the USB soundcard and my headset, however I can't help but think that if I was using the integrated audio on my mobo I would be getting better quality audio then I get from the USB soundcard. The mobo has SupremeFX X-Fi 2 built in 8-channel High Def audio.

Can anyone tell me if it is it possible to use these headphone just by plugging them into the front of my case (3.5mm jack) and still get the 7.1 playback that I can get when they are connected to the USB soundcard?

Yes and no, if you mean the steel series USB soundcard thingy, then one of the big things that does is simulate 7.1 sound over 2.0 stereo headphones, which is something the normal realtek onboard audio cannot do (it can do 7.1 but only with multiple speakers/outputs, not fake it over stereo.
However I do believe that the creative X-fi can do it (I'm guessing you're using an asus ROG motherboard) you'd need to check through the sound settings to find it.
And yes that onboard should be way better than the steel series usb thing

Thanks Pob. Yes it's an ROG mobo, I've had it close to a year and have not even come close to really looking at the feature set in any detail.

In fact after reading your post I realised that I hadn't even installed the X-Fi drivers and software, so I'm doing that now. I decided not to install the media player and the media server, I might go back and add them later, but I have never liked the way that Creative hardware carries so much overhead in terms of the software it seems to want to install, I have installed Alchemy, AutoUpd, EAXGadget, SBCon, SBPanel and THXAudCP how much of that will I actually need?

Ok. I tried installing the software and I've checked that I have the HD audio cable connected to the mobo but the device manager only shows AMD High Definition Audio Device (shows that twice) and Realtek High Definition Audio. There is no mention of the SupremeFX X-Fi 2 soundcard and how to enable this in the manual other then a brief description of what the soundcard does in the Special Features section of the Product Information Chapter. The only thing I could find was a section on how to activate the

I can't see anything in the BIOS that suggests it would activate the SupremeFX X-Fi 2, so I'm starting to think that either I have to add something to get this to work, like the SPDIF