Advice on Gaming motherboard and SLI / Crossfire and HDMI/Sound connection

Question

I have been looking at the following motherboard Z87M GAMING | MSI Global

I am a littel confused, it seems to offer a HDMI connection on board so I assume if I add a SLI / Crossfire (which it says it supports) then this HDMI connection becomes obsolete and I need to use the HDMI on the SLI / Crossfire board ?

Or will it be still used and the motherboard only uses the GPU of the SLI/Crossfire board ?

Is the sound also transmitted through the HDMI on the SLI / Crossfire board, I presume I need to connect something on the motherboard and the SLI /Crossfire board isn't a sound card so it will need to use the onboard sound.

I would like to connect an HDMI cable direct to my TV and have video and sound.

Still a bit of a novice in this area.

Answer 1

Basically most versions of HDMI cables are able to transfer both Audio and Video. on-board HDMI port is available only when you don't have any discrete graphic card on your motherboard. so when you use SLI/Crossfire the on-board HDMI along with the build-in GPU in your CPU will be automatically disabled (assuming you have a Core i series CPU).

When you connect your computer to your TV/monitor using HDMI cable you can also enable this feature to also let the sound transfer through it but you don't have to. there should be an option in your sound card settings to specify the output for the audio so in your case and for that particular motherboard, after installing sound card drivers, there will be a program named "Realtek HD audio manager" that has the option to change the audio output. it can be changed through Windows sound settings too.