MIMO-OFDM receivers with horizontal encoding are considered in this paper. The successive interference cancellation (SIC) algorithm is compared to the K-best list sphere detector (LSD). A modification to the K-best LSD algorithm is introduced. The SIC and K-best LSD receivers are designed for a 2 x 2 antenna system with 64-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). The ASIC implementation results for both architectures are presented. The K-best LSD outperforms the SIC receiver in bad channel conditions but the SIC receiver performs better in channels with less correlated MIMO streams. The latency of the K-best LSD is large due to the high modulation order and list size. The throughput of the SIC receiver is more than 6 times higher than that of the K-best LSD.