I'm looking at buying a new motherboard and have been looking at the MSI K7N2-L sold by scan for £70. I'm not really in the know about soundcards but i've heard the terms 6 channel and 5.1 and i'm pretty sure thats what I want. Thing is, is there anything else I need to know or are all 5.1 audio motherboards the same when it comes to sound. Is it best to get a motherboard with an SPDIFF output (whatever that is) or does it not really matter? Cheers, Andy

That's the right question because no they are not all the same. The sound quality is more or less the same since its digitally generated and mainly dependant on your speakers for quality, but the digital generation will happen either within your cpu or on the sound chip. Only the nforce2, and only the premium southbridge version of nforce2, has a built in apu to do the sound generation so your cpu is left to do other things. Nforce2 boards with an MCP southdridge have surround sound but the cpu has to do the work, but nforce2 boards with the MCP-T southbridge have the built in apu to do the audio processing. For most people there is no noticeable difference but for high-end games that make extensive use of sound, up to 10% of the cpu cycles are lost to sound processing when using an mcp nf2 board as opposed to the nf2 mcp-t (sometimes called mcp2). http://www.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20020716/nforce2-06.html The board you are looking at has the mcp chipset I think. Again you will love the sound either way but to have sound processing offload go with the higher end board. the spdiff is something you would probably not use. http://www.aopen.com/products/mb/spdif.htm

Cheers, thats cleared it up.