thanks for your reply racerx9146.
but i still would like to confirm if is it possible to use the mobo headers instead of 1/8 jacks w/o losing their (1/8j) functions? what do you think?
I'm bringing this one back from the dead. Just wanted to give an update. I was able to get this to work. Looks like I initially couldn't get it to work because I must have stripped out something from my windows install when I initially did my setup. I re-installed a full version of windows and the 5.1 sound works great!