Basically I will be needing a low profile PCIe sound card with optical out.

There isn't a hell of a lot of selection, seems the assumption is if you need sound it is on the motherboard.

That one has PCIe and a low profile bracket, but it uses the C-Media CM8828 chipset.

My understanding that chipset is only supported in 3.17+ kernels, CentOS 7 uses 3.10.x

A) By any chance, has the been back-ported in CentOS kernel?

B) If not, does anyone know of a 3rd party repo that has it as a kernel module built against CentOS kernel?

I suspect B is no because it looks like the patches were to ALSA driver itself and not a new module.

I'd prefer not to have to run a custom kernel because of updates. Anyone know the status of that chipset in CentOS 7?