Does my motherboard support 5.1 surround sound?

[Xx_Anonymous_xX]

Hey,

I have a question about my motherboard. It is an Asrock 870 Extreme3 and I was wondering if this motherboard supports 5.1 surround sound (for watching movies). Can someone please help me out?

 

[ssddx]

it supports up to 7.1 however i'm not going to be able to say if the onboard sound is going to be good or not. listen and see if you hear any crackling, buzzing, distortion or other things. if you note any then a cheap soundcard will fix that. if you dont hear any then use your onboard.

keep in mind i'm talking about hooking it up to 5.1/7.1 pc speakers. if you intend to hook it up to a home theater system, its a little more involved and you'd need to list if this is what you need to do.

 

[Xx_Anonymous_xX]

The plan is too hook it up to a home theater system. I dont know what kind of speakers or amplifier it is (it is from a friend of mine). But what do I have to do to make this work? Also will an optical toslink cable do the job?

 

[ssddx]

generally there are 3 ways to go about it:

optical, coax and hdmi.

hdmi is the only way you can get uncompressed audio.
optical can support compresed 5.1 or uncompressed 2.0

if your motherboard supports optical out it would also need to support DDL (dolby digital live), DTS-Connect or similar which essentially "compresses" the audio for use with optical. otherwise you'd be stuck with stereo sound only on optical and scratching your head wondering why it wont work. also, the receiver/amp you are using also has to be able to support 5.1 over optical. you'd need to read the manual to see if it does or not.

the best way is via hdmi if the set supports it. you can either passthrough the hdmi video to your monitor (on some models, this is the cleanest way) or just run another hdmi from your graphics card for audio (would show up as an extended monitor in this way but wont draw any additional gpu power)

everything depends on what connection types you have to work with. you'd need to specify.