more thoughts
Been watching this for a bit.
The Realtek 889 will give you more than enough discrete-ness. Use it until you get expensive speakers ($600 and up).
The Logitech G51 would probably be an enjoyable set for you. I enjoyed their less expensive X-540 for a number of years until I just recently stumbled into a 10 year old Altec Lansing ADA885 set (SPDIF in).
I personally don't like Creative - my opinion.
If you want to watch movies, you need a player with a Dolby decoder - you will pay extra for that licensing, but that will give you true 5.1 . There's very little true 7.1 media out there.
My interests for this system are HDTV w 5.1(Autumnwave OnAir USB HDTV), Blu-Ray with DTS(Lite-On player)(Corel WinDVD9 Plus - which I don't recommend - get a separate blu-ray player component-$200), and what I would call simple games: NWN etc. Also have Hannspree 28" monitor that is HDMI/HDCP, and 9800GTX card of I forget which brand, also HDCP. I also feed a standalone upscale DVD player to the Hannspree via HDMI but had to cut pin/wire 13 to kill the jump to next chapter signals from the monitor.
My past hi-fi experience includes Krells and Snells and a McCormack. I unfortunately have expensive ears.
