I understand that an HDMI cable carries both digital HD video as well as digital 5.1 (or 7.1) sound. However, when I run an HDMI cable to my monitor, I don't use that sound because I have my speakers hooked directly to my motherboard based sound outlets.j

What I'm wondering is if I just run an HDMI cable from the back of my video card to a receiver will that include actual 5.1 sound quality sound?? I guess that would mean Nvidia cards include 5.1 sound?? Or would I have to run an HDMI cable for video and an optical digital cable for sound?

Here's the proposed setup. 1 TV. 1 Surround Sound system with reciever, 1 DirecTV box, and one computer. The reciever has 3 HDMI inputs on it.

I'm wondering if I can simply run an HDMI cable from my DirecTV box to the receiver AND an HDMI cable from the video card of my computer to the receiver, and then have one HDMI out running from the reciever to the TV and whether or not I will get true 5.1 sound. I know I will with the DirecTV box, but I'm not so sure about whether the Nvidia video card would actually be carrying 5.1 sound through the HDMI cable.

Sorry, I know that looks and reads more complicated than it is but I guess it's the best I know how to put it in words.

I have gotten so much wonderful help on these forums that I now would rather ask all of my questions here rather than a tech oriented site. However, if me asking such questions here is getting old I will happily cut back. But the folks here are as knowledgable about this stuff as are tech folks. Pretty impressive.

Generally, I don't think the signal from your graphics card includes sound at all. It's true that HDMI can transmit both video and audio, but your graphics card most likely doesn't output audio.

Oh, ok thanks. For some reason I thought it did include some sound output but I wasn't sure if it was 5.1 quality or not. Heh, don't know why I just assumed that.

Then the setup is going to be tricky. Because if have to run an HDMI cable to the receiver for video and an optical cable to the receiver for sound, it will be impossible to have the receiver set on both at the same time, so depending on which input I selected I would either have sound and no picture or picture and no sound. Ugh, this is looking more and more like it's undoable.

Scratch what I just said. It depends on your graphics card. Newer cards do output audio it seems. http://www.mediacollege.com/hardware/connectivity/hdmi/pc-audio.html

Oh thanks man. That was helpful, but didn't answer whether it would be true 5.1 sound. It says the quality would be "superb" whatever that means.

I like the true 5.1 sound playing games because I can literally tell which way an enemy is based solely on the sound. If I hear an enemy behind me over my left shoulder, I immediately know which way to turn. And the only way that's possible is with 6 separate channels of sound (5.1) or 8 separate channels (7.1).

In short, HDMI supports up to 8 channels. The quality depends on the software you're using (it's selected output) and the quality of each device it passes through.

For instance, to get 7.1 surround sound, you need the following set up:

-Computer output set to 7.1 surround output (whether OS setting, or sound source configuration)
-Game/software set to 7.1 surround output
-Receiver capable of 7.1 surround and set to 7.1 surround output
-amp/Speakers capable of 7.1 surround, utilizing output from receiver.

If ANY one of those are not set to that configuration, you're going to get something other than 7.1 surround.

But to answer your question original question- a standard HDMI cable can support up to 8 speaker settings, as well as a graphic 720p resolution

"High speed" HDMI cables can support a faster data transfer and better/more complicated graphics (allowing 1080p, 4k, 3d, and deep color resolution).

Yeah, I avoid this problem on my setup by connecting my PC directly to my TV via HDMI (bypassing the receiver) and running my audio to my surround reciever (using analog outs because as far as I can tell, you can't get true 5.1 channel over an optical cable from a PC, because the receiver will always do its own decoding of an audio stream over optical, resulting in something other than true 5.1.)