Topic: ISO sound card advice for HTPC

[Chad]

I am going to be putting together a HTPC soon. Do you guys have any advice or recommendations on what are some good sound cards out there now. I'll be connecting to a Yamaha RX-V1800 AV receiver via HDMI to a 5.1 speaker setup.

[adrianf74]

I'm running an AMD A6-3670K on an ASUS F1A75-M PRO/CSM (I was shipped the Corporate Stable Model free of charge) and it serves me perfectly fine running on-board Realtek Audio connected via HDMI to a Yamaha HTR-6260 receiver.  In fact, I had used on-board audio on my previous HTPC build 18 months back and it was crystal clear (no hiss) as well.   Even the Zotac ZBOX Nano AD10 that I ran in-between builds did a solid job of HD Audio via HDMI.

On-board audio, when ran digitally, has come a long way from the old days.

[H₂O]

I have an intel i3-2120t > asrock mini-itx intel board and use both the chipset audio via optical out for audio on a second output and the intel built in audio on the hdmi (part of the CPU video) to run my tv

The chipset works great w/ foobar2000 (currently using the openasio driver for it)

And I can watch tv through the htpc and listen to music in a different room using foobar

Pretty sweet

No additional sound card was needed

My only gripe is that my on board sound does not support 88.2 or 176.4 kHz sampling rates.