Need Guidance on Graphics Card

[wswartzendruber]

My AMD 4350 card just ate the dirt, but I'll spare you the rant on that. I'm looking to NVIDIA for a replacement. I require:

1. Fully open driver stack (running hardened kernel).
2. Audio over HDMI (more than just stereo, if possible).
3. PCI Express x16.

I greatly appreciate any guidance you all may have.

[Panix]

If you want to use an open driver, most people here will recommend an ATI(AMD) card.

[chithanh]

Have a look at http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix and http://wiki.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature
HDMI audio on Nvidia cards is only supported by the proprietary driver.
If you require HDMI audio and open source drivers, then get a r600/r700 card.

[wswartzendruber]

Okay, I just ditched the hardened kernel and rebuilt the whole machine (Gentoo). So the proprietary drivers just became on option.

Now, is there a cheap NVIDIA card that supports 5.1 LPCM over HDMI using proprietary Linux drivers?