Decent gaming sound card for SPDIF output

[M_Taylor40]

Hey everyone,

After a bit of advice on a decent sound card for mainly gaming and sometimes listening to music. I play BF3, Skyrim, the STALKER series, NFSMW and the wife plays The Sims 3.

My current setup is the rig in my profile, using the on-board Realtek ALC887 audio which is connecting to an external Onkyo HT-R380 5.1 setup through an optical cable.

The Onkyo 5.1 setup works fine as I've got my Xbox 360 connected to it using the 2nd optical input and all my games play in 5.1, but through my PC everything defaults to stereo. I've read this is to do with "Dolby Digital Live" not being available/enabled due to my on-board sound which is fine as it's not the best lol!

I've therefore been looking at some internal PCI-E sound cards and have picked out a couple but want some opinions, preferably from people who have used the cards or can advise on any others in the price range.

The cards I've found are:
Asus Xonar DGX - http://uk.asus.com/Multimedia/Audio_Cards/Xonar_DGX/
Creative Recon3D - http://uk.store.creative.com/sound-b...e/1-20885.aspx

I can get the Xonar for around £25 and the Recon3D for £40, don't really want to spend loads and can possibly push to £50 but I'm unsure even do what I want. I rarely game using my Steelseries 5Hv2 headset so 99% of the time I will using the Onkyo 5.1 setup, so headphone quality is not really an issue.

The other thing I've been wondering but have not researched is, can I connect my HD7850 through to the Onkyo 5.1 decoder using HDMI so it is processing graphics and audio, then use the HDMI out from the amp to output to my monitor through a HDMI-DVI cable? I'll try to source a HDMI-DVI cable/adapter from work to test it but does anyone know if this would even work lol?

If anyone can provide some advice I'd really appreciate it.

M_Taylor40

[kalniel]

The other thing I've been wondering but have not researched is, can I connect my HD7850 through to the Onkyo 5.1 decoder using HDMI so it is processing graphics and audio, then use the HDMI out from the amp to output to my monitor through a HDMI-DVI cable? I'll try to source a HDMI-DVI cable/adapter from work to test it but does anyone know if this would even work lol?

Yes, you can use the receiver as a video pass through. Another Hexus user just posted about a similar setup, though in their case the brightness levels were being adjusted so it wasn't a clean pass through.

[M_Taylor40]

Thanks for the info Kalniel, I'll try using the 7850->Amp->monitor setup, just hope that it works with a HDMI->DVI cable for the monitor lol.