I cheated a bit on the KRP (but I did spring for the Silverstone case, now I need to build a new component rack to do it justice!)

I bought the "little brother" to the Platinum board:
MoBo: MSI K8N NEO4-F
Video: Chaintech GeForce 6200
TV: PC 3000

Look ma, no sound card! I was intrigued by the KRP inclusion of a sound card when the Mobo has S/PDIF onboard. Now I'm beginning to understand why. When somebody smarter than me does something, I should just follow that....

Do I need to get another sound card at this point, or does anyone have the optical S/PDIF working on the MSI K8N NEO4-F or Platinum boards? I'm on R5A26. I haven't tried everything yet, but last week I had R5A16, and spent many hours researching and trying things, to no avail. Ok, I did get pretty red light to shoot out of the cable at one point, but there was no sound. I followed write-ups, played with the toggle for AC3 on/off, etc..
I'm going into an Onkyo TX-650 receiver, if that matters.
Audio is fine analog, which is what I'm using now. Just a Y jack to L/R stereo, on the red/white plugs into the receiver.

Thanks for any tips, especially a thumbs up/down on using the onboard digital audio, vs. buying the chaintech card. Thanks.

You need that other sound card. Apparently there is some driver problem that keeps the on-board audio from working. Once the Dragon folks can convince the vendor to fix the driver (I think it's whoever makes the Northbridge chip set, NVidia I believe) then the PCI sound card won't be necessary.

I was afraid of that. Thanks for confirming. I should have listened to the little voice in my head saying "if the dragon people can't make the onboard sound work, what makes you think that YOU have a shot?"

Have you found that mobo to work perfectly fine for this project?

So far, so good, except for the audio. It's my first Linux project though, and as Yogi says, "I don't know what I don't know!"

I DO wish I had FireWire though.

Here's my shopping list:

SilverStone Lascala SST-LC10 HTPC Case, Black, w/400w PSU $145.00
MSI K8N NEO4-F / AMD 64 / Zalman Fan / 512MB RAM Bundle $293.75
Lite-on / 16x4x16x DVD+RW $44.99
Chaintech GeForce 6200 $49.95
PC 3000 $169.00
Ultra 512MB PC3200 DDR 400MHz CL3 Memory $24.99 (rebate)
Seagate / 250GB / 7200 / 8MB / ATA-100 $69.99 (another rebate)
ACK-581 wireless PS2 IR / black $32.99
And now, the chaintech sound card....

I wonder how well an add-in PCI f/w card would work?

Me too. I expect it'll work, just need to find one with a proven record. There are lots of them for $20 or so. I'd get one with at least one internal connection so that I can use the front connector on my Silverstone case.

That's certainly more economical than the Platinum mobo, huh?

Not so much, no. It's a $35 difference to start with. When I did a "stare and compare" between them, I missed the FireWire. So, to justify my cheapo decision, I now must wait until I find a <$20 card.
But anyway, the MoBo difference is $35, if you don't need FireWire and the extra ethernet port.
OTOH, I DID think I was buying a MoBo with a useable optical S/PDIF port. So the MoBo has been kind of a let-down, overall. Except of course, that it seems to run well!

When I priced my motherboard against the cheaper model in the same family the math showed that it was CHEAPER to the buy the better motherboard with more integrated components like firewire than to add them even one of them back via a seperate card.

Right. I missed seeing that firewire wasn't there. Also, I didn't understand about the non-working onboard Audio.