I'm attaching a highly detailed artists' rendering of my loft, using the professional CAD tool called Microsoft Paint

Basically, the computer is on the side of the room, and all the components and video switchers are in the back of the room, so I have a roughly 20 foot really well shielded DVI cable and digital coax cable that go from the computer, over to the wall, up the wall, across the ceiling, and back down to connect to the DVI switch and the receiver. So if I want to do an analog 5.1 out to the receiver, I need to connect 6 more bigass 20 foot cables, which is kind of annoying. Since I already have digital out, it would be nice to just be able to DD-encode over that digital coax that I already have.

Note that I can use the receiver as a decoder just fine (in fact, when I play DVD's on the PC, it's fine), but for "6 channel sound" that you get in games, it's some funky Microsoft 6-channel sound encoding, so it can't just be sent over SPDIF directly and be decoded by the reciever (because it's not actually DTS or DD). So something has to reencode that 6-channel signal into DD or DTS specifically, which would solve my problem. The suggestion of the motherboard with the nVidia chips on them is probably the best bet at the moment ...

ms