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well, i'm reding from your question that you do not want a 7.1 speaker system, but you do want surround sound for gamming. that should answer the speaker question right away, unless you aren't sure if you want digital or analog 5.1 speakers.
logitec's Z-5500 are premier digital speakers, which process the signal from your sound card's digital out into the 6 discrete channels. on the other hand, you can go analog, which means you have 3 seperate analog outputs from your sound card to the speakers. in this case, the klipsch promedia or the analog 5.1 logitec setup would suit you nicely (i prefer klipsch)
as for sound card, anything that has a digital output and 5.1 processing will work with the digital speakers, but you need to make sure it has the front, center and rear outputs to handle analog. there are some cards out there that are able to swap output channels through driver configuration, but usually you end up having to choose whether you want to be able to use your microphone or your 5.1 speakers.
that being said, the 2 differences for good all around cards that support your gamming directsound and such algorithms are cards with a true DSP (digital signal processor) and then those with an advanced codec/ADC/DAC setup that utilize the CPU for some of the processing load. in the retail world, this is characterized as the Creative Labs Audigy line, and everyone else. the audigy chips (and live! before them) are true DSP's and do not offload work to the CPU. every other gamming card does.
now, is it a big deal that the work is offloaded tot he CPU? that depends. that is why 3dmark 2003 had the sound card test, to see how much sound effects the performance of your system. if you look at the reviewers, most people will tell you that software rendered sound performance hits are negligable when compared to things like video card memory, memory bandwidth and texture piplines. with those factors, you can expect frame rate differences in factors of 10, whereas with the software rendered sound, you can expect framerate hits in the 1 and 2 FPS range.
ok, now that you have been flooded with allt hat information, here's my suggestion: decide what speakers you want first, then choose the sound card to go with them. the speakers will most likely cost more than the sound card, and then you can decide the pricerange you're looking for. if you go with creative labs, just remember to back upt he CD to at least 3 different places as soon as you get it home, because you can't download their drivers from their website, only updates that require the cd to be installed already.
if you device to go with a non-creative labs solution, look for anyhting witht he VIA Envy sound chip. right now that is about the best solution for outstanding sound quality and performance, and you can usually get a really quality card supporting all the gamming and digital entertainment standards (including 7.1) for under 100 dollars, in some cases around 35 dollars.
in my personal oppinion, i do not like the way creative labs deals with their software installation and driver support. i don't like how so many seperate software packages must be used to gain full functionality of their cards within windows. i don't like that they have no stand alone download on their website for their drivers. i don't like that their support FAQ tells you to turn off DMS on your IDE channels if you experience strange sound artifacts during heavy file transfers across the IDE and PCI bus. to me, not having to deal with that is worth losing 2 frames per second in my games.
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