Saturn,
You may very well have a board that does not resample, they are far and few between from my understanding. A quick test would be the following, pop in a CD hit play and see what the receiver reports. In my case and many others it seems, it will more than likely report 48khz via SPDIF. I have an SB Audigy1, and while it does allow me to set 44.1/48/96 for SPDIF, it has been explained to me that there are a couple layers of resampling and its always best to set the card to 48khz and pass it a 48khz stream so it does not molest it on its way out (DVD's output 16/48khz and all the cards *should* output a bit perfect stream, but others report not always). As for system sounds, just for an example the XP startup wav file is 16/22 so in my case for my Audigy and my onboard sound it is output as 48khz instead of 22khz based on my receivers display.
Now does it really make it difference? Well if the card is passing resampling 16/44.1 to 16/48 PCM stream via SPDIF then the die hard guys will argue that it has been molested and is less than ideal.
I sat down with my box last nite for a good 2 hours or so with a set of Seinheisser headphones and listened to a couple CD's via my Technic's CD player, as well as the HTPC (ripped the CD to wav files). First I listened to PC via its native resampling, and compared it to the Technic's output (both going through the Denon, only difference is the Technic's output is analog compared to the PC's SPDIF interface). I was hard pressed to find any audible differences with my ear's once I brought the output levels, and tone on the PC to virtually the same as the Technics. I listened and listened and when I thought I heard a difference and replayed specific parts I could not really tell the difference. Next I decided to take the advice of some of the AVS forum members by using 'better' software resampling plugin's for winamp (SSRC directsound output plugin) and had it resample to 16/48 in software which should have not been touch/resampled again via hardware and thus should have been 'better'. As I could not tell the difference the first time, I dont know why I bothered as I could not tell the difference the second time. So either the Audigy's resampling is better than they (AVS forum members) want to believe or it simply doesnt matter as I do not have the 'golden ear'. Maybe next I will pick up the Revo board from M-Audio and see what a a native 16/44.1 PCM via SPDIF sounds like compared to the analog output of Technics player, maybe my Technics CD player is crap and I am just hearing crap all around (albeit I always thought it sounded pretty good, and had read long ago that it actually wasnt too bad for the money, its an older SL-PG300 4dac 1bit mash unit)
So I guess in the end it's really up to you and your ears. My biggest problem right now is that with the new Axiom speakers and headphones (picked up headphones this past weekened to trouble shoot some stuff I heard via the speakers) is that I am discovering that a lot of what I listen to (classic rock) are poorly mastered and I can hear bits of distortion. I need to pull out the turntable and see if the distortion is present in the vinyl press, if not I may pick up the Revo card sooner than later and record the vinyls as 24/96 wav files and dump them to DVDR. Or maybe look into some of the universal SACD/DVDA and see how they compare (problem with this is that I don't think a lot of what I listen to is available yet)
Yeah video stuff seems to be changing, with DirectX9 and VMR9 things are going to get really interesting (no more overlay battles). I will have to look into the chipset on your VIA board, I know there are a few guys using the NForce based boards which are NVidia based and seem to have decent outputs for built in video.
Do any of those ITX boards have an AGP slot at all? I know one of the shuttles do, but I dont think that is ITX. If so that would kick ass due to the sheer size and video quality you could get out of such a small box (audio aside as I wouldnt care so long as it output bit perfect DVD SPDIF streams). I could even build a game 'console' out of one for my setup.
That AOpen board looks interesting, would love to hear it for myself just to see if the tubes make any difference
-pd
