HTPC Alternative with Blu-Ray

buying a soundcard and having a receiver is double dipping in the money pot. if you used spdif (or hdmi in the future) the receiver would do the sound processing instead of a sound card. no need to even have a soundcard then. (since onboard spdif optical out works for this). or... if you used hdmi in the future you can output the sound data on the hdmi for the receiver to process (this is what i do).

spdif optical cannot handle uncompressed 5.1 audio (but it can handle 2.1) so there may be a bit of quality lost however it may still be better than having a cheap soundcard and analog (can get noise). honestly the best is perhaps to use hdmi and get a receiver which can handle it however you do not want to go that route quite yet. if however you do use high quality audio cables... analog might be better until you go hdmi. i wouldnt spend $150-200 on a soundcard though. i would put that money towards a receiver which is going to bring you up to date in tech instead of spending $200 now then $200-500 a year down the line.

there are no commercial solutions which can do everything that a htpc can do. something like a roku is great for browsing channels, something like the sony streaming player supports a keyboard but has a more limited channel list. a smart blueray player or even a ps3 adds dvd/br/cd support however is limited when it comes to streaming channels. while using a htpc is not as easy as some of the other devices with nice GUI menus and a remote it allows for the most options.

i use a tower pc for most of my media needs. i have it hooked up to my receiver via a dvi-to-hdmi cable (since my gtx470 doesnt have hdmi) and it works great. i do have onboard sound but it is not used and i do not have a soundcard. i stream netflix, crunchyroll, youtube, tunein radio (3x better than pandora is by the way), play br/dvd/cd, mp3, etcetera. i do have a ps3 which i prefer for dvd/br playback (remote control is nice when sitting back from the keyboard) but it is quite limited when it comes to anything else media related.

oh and ssd is completely unneccessary for the system. it will boot up faster but you dont want to store anything on it besides the os since price per gb ratings are horrible for ssd.
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so there are my thoughts.

i would use the soundcard money to upgrade your receiver sooner than later and get a video card with sound out via dvi or native hdmi support.