Sound card for PC

I currently use an ASUS Xonar Essence STX sound card with my PC. It worked fine for my needs when I was using windows XP. I have upgraded to Windows 7 for some other applications and the ASUS card will not work correctly anymore, even with the patches and updates. I am looking for a new sound card that will be similar to the ASUS. Any suggestions? So far I am interested in the ESI Juli but it is made more for recording. All I want to do is play from the optical drive to an RCA output directly to my amplifier.