Need help with Z-680s and ABIT onboard

I had an Asus A7N8X deluxe mb b4 and i had my z-680's connected to the onboard soundstorm through coaxal cable. It automaticlly gave the the 5 channels and i could test each one in the soundstorm control panel.
-well now i have an Abit-ic-7 max 3 and i have my Z-680's connected through digital out, fiber optical cable. Now i get all of the options of effects through the external decoder and b4 i didn't, but when i go to the sound effect control panel for to test my speakers the only ones that work are the left and right ones. I mean i get 5.1 in games and movies, but this is bugging me and i need to know what settings and options to turn on so i can get my channels to test correctly.


thanks

Have you tried changing the speaker setup to digital only with the speaker wizard? It might still be set to analog.

Only the Nforce(2) MCP-T can encode a dolby digital AC-3 signal which is needed for digital surround sound. All other sound solutions can only pass-through the digital AC-3 signal from pre-encoded material (like DVD). So what you are describing is exactly what I would expect to happen. It is sending a 2 channel PCM data stream to the decoder because that is all the sound chip can do. No control panel settings will change that.

If you want true surround sound in games and any other non pre-encoded material you will need to use the 6-channel analog connections from the computer to the speakers. If you are getting surround sound in anything but a DVD, it is probably the speakers using Pro Logic II decoding or some other DSP.