Using a pc with a home theater system

I was wondering if it's possible to hook up my pc to a home theater system to use those speakers instead my regular pc speakers. i ordered a creative x-fi extreme audio pci-express, which has an optical out. the home theater system has an optical in. obviously i would think i could just connect the two together. does anyone have any experience with a setup like this? how well does it work?

The optical is the way to go, and it should work fine. I have my comp hooked up to a Denon 2808 with optical right now.

You can only get 5 or 7 channel surround through the optical with something like a dolby digital or dts encoded source. The newer X-fis (the Titanium series), as well as several other cards, are capable of dolby digital live encoding, where they take a 5 channel source and encode it into a dolby digital signal with the complete surround. If your card cannot do that however, the best you will get from non-encoded sources is 2 channel PCM (although it will be quite high quality).