Well, anyone who are looking for budget HTPC setup should take a serious look at AMD 780G or Nvidia 780a series motherboards:

- The price is around RM 340. Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H is quite a good choice.
- The onboard video card support hardware decoding for DVD/H264/Blu-ray. As long as you are not into gaming, you don't need a dedicated video card.
- Multichannel onboard soundcard is included from Realtek.
- There is no need to buy high end CPU, a dual core 2.0GHz+ will be enough for normal usage, but Phenom CPU offers more post-processing features like higher quality deinterlancing for DVD playing.
- Pair it with 2GB DDR2 800 RAM and it'll even run Vista SP1 smoothly.
- Compare the setup with Intel platform and you'll know that you are getting a lot for lower price, since Intel do not have a decent onboard video card yet. Nvidia haven't release their new motherboard chipset for Intel also.

So, for now AMD platform is a very good choice when it comes to low cost HTPC. At least until Intel strikes back. Personally, don't have too much hope for X48 series chipset in terms of low cost HTPC, as you can expect higher price by looking at how much X38 is cost now. Meanwhile, AMD 790GX chipset will be out around June 2008, but it's more expensive.

I don't hate Intel actually, just that they have very good CPU but not motherboard chipset. Therefore, we have to spend more money to get dedicated video card to fill in the void. It's a good choice if you're into gaming, but not very impressive for HTPC, especially if you want it to be small and run cool.

If I not mistaken, by default Creative sound card only output stereo signal via digital out. No matter you've EAX or CMSS turn on or not. Since you can't find the decoder tab, I think it didn't have on board Dolby Digital/DTS decoder and need to rely on software decoder like PowerDVD. I'm not sure if you can set PowerDVD to use SPDIF out and let it pass through to receiver or not.

If you want to get 5.1 surround sound from the sound card even when you are not watching movies with DD/DTS track, then you need either one of this:
- Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect that will encode all soundcard output signal to DD/DTS in realtime. Your receiver should detect DD/DTS signal, then you should get all surround sound result from EAX/CMSS. Creative actually sell it as an add-on here. Alternatively, you can try out a trick here, since Creative disabled DD Live feature via software driver, or you can try to search for some 3rd party, free DD realtime encoder.

- Use analog multichannel output instead of optical cable, then you need to do DD/DTS decoding using software.