[jcrawfordor]

Should be just fine, at the minor cost of losing some configuration via your receiver remote, as long as your PC can deliver multichannel PCM to your receiver. Until relatively recently there wasn't a common way to do this, but recent versions of HDMI can.

The main reason that passthrough is the norm is history - the connection to the receiver used to generally be S/PDIF or HDMI 1.x versions that had the same capability as S/PDIF, so you had to use Dolby or DTS to get the audio to the receiver. Otherwise you could only do two channels.

Actually a shocking number of PC motherboards and soundcards of that era have 7.1 worth of analog outputs, but I can't say anyone ever used them. I believe 7.1 analog outputs were required for Intel HD Audio compliance.