Question New CMOS maybe battery draining fast?

[liberty610]

Hello everyone.



I have a Gigabyte X570 xtreme motherboard paired with 64gb of ram, RTX 2080ti, and an AMD 3950x CPU. I also have the latest BIOS version (F38) installed. Recently, I had some weird behavior with my motherboard that lead to the system doing random reboots and not posting properly. After doing RAM tests with Memtest86 I chalked it up to the CMOS battery (this board is about 5 years old now; it was about due for a replacement.)

I couldn't seem to find the section in the BIOS that showed the CMOS battery level, so I did some searching online and someone said that in the HWMonitor app, the VBAT section under the motherboard was the CMOS battery information. When I first looked at it before replacing the CMOS battery, it was reading 2.888v and I read that anything under 3.0v could lead to random issues. So I decided to change it out. The annoying thing about this motherboard in particular is, the battery is under some metal heat sync plates for other compents like my M.2 SSds, and the only way to loosen the particular part of the plate to get to the cmos is by taking out a screw on the back of the board. In order to get to that particular screw with my current case, I have to remove the entire board from the case, including my AIO block for the CPU. Not a huge ordeal if I only have to do it once every few years, but I am already seeing a quick drop on the VBAT number in HWMonitor.

I replaced the battery with a brand new Energizer brand battery about a week ago, and when I first checked HWmonitor after replacing it, it was showing me 3.264V under the VBAT section. Now a week later, I have seen that number drop 3 times already, and it is currently showing me 3.096V. This number doesn't seem to fluctuate either. Once it drops, I never see it go back up, and I have been keeping a close eye on it the past several days. It sat at 3.192V for a couple days, then dropped to 3.144V for a couple more, now it's down to the current 3.096V.



My PC is behaving normal with no issues, but I wasn't sure if this was a cause for concern at all? Is this normal to see the numbers drop like this? Am I even reading the numbers right? Thanks in advance for any feedback.

AMD 3950x | Gigabyte X570 Xtreme | G.Skill - Ripjaws DDR4 32GB Ram | Corsair H115i Cooler | EVGA RTX 2080ti | Gigabyte 2TB M.2 SSD PCIE 4.0 Drive | WD Black 2TB M.2 PCIe 4.0 Drive |WD Blue 4TB SATA SSD Drive| WD Blue 2TB M.2 SATA SSD Drive| WD Black 6TB HDD (x2) | Corsair 760T ATX Full Tower Case | Seasonic 860W Platinum PSU | Windows 11 Pro

 

[Lutfij]

You might want to bring in a donor PC and hook it up in place of your PC to see if the same power drain on your CMOS(CR2032) battery is evident, if so, then your wall outlet might be compromised. You could conversely swap out the PSU for a reliably built higher wattage unit and see if that changes anything.

We ask users to post their specs in the thread's body as opposed to leaving them in their sig spaces, since sig space specs can and will change. When that happens this thread and their relevant suggestions will end up moot to the end user in the same boat as you're in now. I've shoehorned your specs into your thread's body for this reason.

That being said, how old is your PSU in your build?

 

[liberty610]

You might want to bring in a donor PC and hook it up in place of your PC to see if the same power drain on your CMOS(CR2032) battery is evident, if so, then your wall outlet might be compromised. You could conversely swap out the PSU for a reliably built higher wattage unit and see if that changes anything.

We ask users to post their specs in the thread's body as opposed to leaving them in their sig spaces, since sig space specs can and will change. When that happens this thread and their relevant suggestions will end up moot to the end user in the same boat as you're in now. I've shoehorned your specs into your thread's body for this reason.

That being said, how old is your PSU in your build?

Good points on the hardware specs in the thread. My signature is off a bit already actually. A couple weeks ago I upgraded the ram to a dual channel 64gb kit.

I have a SeaSonic Platinum SS 860XP2 860W power supply. I didn't think the PSU was a possible issue because I was in the thought process that I had not replaced it that long ago. Looking through my purchase history, it looks like I installed it in December of 2016... eeek! It's getting up there in age.

I have a Thermaltake Dr. Power II PSU tester on hand. Should I be pulling that out and checking it?

IN the event the PSU is starting to fail, is there anyway of being able to replace it with a newer Seasonic model without having to pull all the power cables from the case? I learned the hard way several years ago that not all PSU power cables are wired the same. But if I have to swap out the PSU, I would like to not have to re-wire the entire case as I have everything tidy and ziptied.

 

[liberty610]

Updated:

I took the CPU power cables, GPU power cables, and motherboard power cables out to connect them to my PSU tester. PSU readings are fine. After re-connecting the cables to the motherboard and booting it back up, the VBAT reading is back to 3.144.

This is the first time I seen it drop below 3.144v to 3.096v, then jump back up to 3.144v. I'm assuming the reading will never be 100% accurate, but the fact that it jumped back up is a good sign I take it?