Battery time

[AlexC]

Glad the topic was there and wish I had looked at the forum sooner.

I spent all day and all night yesterday troubleshooting every single component trying to figure out why my machine would turn on and immediately cut the power off as soon as I pressed the power switch.

Bypassing the switch with the ATX Pwr header would turn the PSU on but the CPU and southbridge would stay off and none of the 1.1V, 1.2V and 1.8V rails had any power.

I hadn't turned on the X1000 for the last 9 months as I had been working on building a very special case for it for Amiwest and it was so frustrating after putting everything together to have to take everything apart to diagnose the motherboard :-/

[ChrisH]

My X1000's starting-up problem suddenly reappeared, which was unexpected since I'd only changed the battery 4 months ago. I was seeing:
* I only got a black screen with a yellow square in the top left, or I got stripy graphical nonsense (seemed like a graphics card issue!).
Or rarely if it did start then it would hang after Kickstart had loaded.

Replacing the old CR2032 battery seems to have fixed it (fingers crossed), but weirdly the old battery has a voltage of 3.0 (while the new one was 3.2 or 3.3 volts I forget) so it's voltage had seemingly hardly dropped at all.
I shall have to see if this really fixes the issue.

My original problems *may* have only started since I installed this PCI-Express network card in June 2018:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01M74CLEG
This may be coincidental, but if the problem re-appears in a few months then I may try going back to a plain PCI network card...

[Raziel]

My X1000's starting-up problem suddenly reappeared, which was unexpected since I'd only changed the battery 4 months ago. I was seeing:
* I only got a black screen with a yellow square in the top left, or I got stripy graphical nonsense (seemed like a graphics card issue!).
Or rarely if it did start then it would hang after Kickstart had loaded.

Replacing the old CR2032 battery seems to have fixed it (fingers crossed), but weirdly the old battery has a voltage of 3.0 (while the new one was 3.2 or 3.3 volts I forget) so it's voltage had seemingly hardly dropped at all.
I shall have to see if this really fixes the issue.

My original problems *may* have only started since I installed this PCI-Express network card in June 2018:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01M74CLEG
This may be coincidental, but if the problem re-appears in a few months then I may try going back to a plain PCI network card...

Why do mainboards still have physical batteries at all nowadays?

For envvars/Firmware settings/CFE settings/UBoot settings/whatever a little EEPROM (or whatever it is called) should be sufficient (one where the settings gets written permanently and are not erased on power down, but can always be rewritten afterwards).
For the correct time there is the internet (heck, even modern router provide a system wide clock syncro and those are *always* on the internet)

That way that stupid battery leaking would be history