I’ve been having a issue where my CMOS battery dies about every 1.5 months. I’m using a MSI Z97-G45 motherboard with i7-4790k, 16Gb of Corsair DDR3 Ram, 2 SSDs & 2 HDDs, 1 Blu-ray burner, EVGA 3060, Seasonic 750 watt PSU.
This board had the original battery when I aquired it and worked without issue initially. Even added a TPM 1.2 module. Now I usually leave the power switch on my surge protector off when my machine isn’t in use and have never had a problem with CMOS battery drain. In fact, I have 2 older systems still running with theirs which are left off for much longer periods.
My question is could the TPM cause the battery drain as it’s the only thing added that I might cause this.
Thanks in advance,
Chris
I would not have thought this to be the case, however, can you run without this TPM for about 2 months to test this out ?
Motherboards generally bypass the CMOS battery if the board has power going to it, meaning that it should only drain the battery if the power is turned off. That doesn’t mean you don’t have another issue going on, but it is possible that the manufacturer never intended for there not to be standby power if the PC is on constant use.
Not sure if this helps any, but the CMOS battery not only powers the chip that saves your BIOS settings, but also the internal clock circuit as well.
Tried without the TPM and still had a battery drain.
Hmm, not sure then, I would check with the Motherboard maker to confirm, could it be some kind of defect ?
in bios check hpet is enabled. (high precision event timer)
it is?
then in windows check to see if its also software enabled in windows.
it is?
turn it off in windows and leave it on in bios.
open and elevated cmd and type
-
To enable HPET as the only timer run the command bcdedit /set useplatformclock true
-
To disable HPET in Windows run the command bcdedit /deletevalue useplatformclock
you can run wintimertester if you want as it will show you what tick rate the hpet clock is running at.
having both hpet and hpet in window set to on will cause the the high precision event timer (a hardware clock) to jump into high state, where it cycles quicker but uses more power.
as a result the bios battery gets drained quicker.
typically 5-6 years is shortened to 18months, with a typical replacement lasting 7-10 months there after.
(dont bother with the 5.99 battery… you can get a pack of 12 for 3quid and they last just as long.)
so disabling it in windows.
will save battery but not disable the clock for the rest of the system.
(warning: turning it off completely is not advised especially if you have an amd gpu. as it will cause random halts and crashes with a colour banded screen and repeating audio loop if you crashed while media was active.)
(for asus users)
if you have an asus board it will be on by default in bios with no option to enable or disable it, and on in windows.
so you may want to disable it in software. (it should stay enabled in bios/uefi)
other than that i dont know of anything else that might be draining the battery as the rest of the stuff like tpm shouldn’t affect battery life dramatically. (shouldn’t 
)
if its nothing to do with hpet then sorry for making you read this 
but it likely is 
Rechargeable 2032 cells are only about double the price of the disposable sort. Just search eBay for LIR2032, and never go shopping for CR2032s again.
Thanks for the reply, I’ll give it a whirl. As what you say does make sense. HPET was enabled both in bios and in Windows. It’s just been weird as I have several older systems with old batteries running strong.
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