8800 Gt

[dpt206]

I read that the new Radeon 3870 card is able to output sound through its dvi port using a dvi to hdmi dongle which would support 5.1 surround sound. My question is does the 8800 GT able to do the same.

[saphalline]

No.

The Radeon HD 3870 is based on ATI's R600 VPU (now owned by AMD) which was initially designed with full HDMI output support. The GeForce 8800 GT is based on NVidia's G80 GPU which was designed with only partial HDCP-compliant duties. Since the base architectures are so different, don't expect NVidia's offerings to compete in the world of H.264 and HDMI until at least the GeForce 9 GPU is released.