Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why Do Motherboards Have Batteries?”.
So your desktop computer probably has a big chunky, power supply and a thick heavy cable running to the wall, to provide all the power it needs. So have you ever wondered why the heck there’s one of those little lithium coin batteries sitting in your motherboard before we tell you we’d like to thank zach bobroff of american megatrends for collaborating with us on this video love you zack, so the battery is there to Power, something called a cmos chip, cmos stands for complementary metal oxide semiconductor and, while that sounds complicated, all you really need to know is that it’s a common way of manufacturing computer chips used for applications from camera, sensors to analog digital converters to amplifiers, but inside a Pc cmos has historically been shorthand for the chip that contained your bios settings. The bios or basic input output system is responsible for controlling low level settings and initializing your hardware when your computer boots up you’re, probably most familiar with it. As that settings program, you can access if you smash the delete or f1 key, while your pc is booting up getting some frustration out in the process, but the cmos chip that keeps these settings was traditionally volatile memory, meaning all of these settings would be lost as Soon, as power was taken away and since many people don’t just leave their computers on 24 7 manufacturers put a coin battery on the motherboard to ensure the settings wouldn’t just disappear. If someone trips over the power cord or does a magic spell but fast forward to modern times, and it turns out that motherboard manufacturers don’t use cmos for bios settings anymore, partly because those old cmos chips only held 128 bytes.
But today’s systems need to store lots. More bios data, so instead they just choose a chip with non-volatile ram or nvram that not only has a higher capacity but can store data persistently, even if there’s no power going to the board. So, what’s the point of still having a battery, then other than sentimental reasons? Of course, we’ll tell you right after we thank msi for sponsoring this video msi’s meg core liquid s360 all-in-one, liquid cpu cooler is a great fit for cooling. Your 12th gen intel cpu. It comes equipped with msi’s, innovative megs, silent, gale, p12 gaming fans and also has a 2.4 inch ips display capable of displaying hardware information, photos, videos and even the weather, whatever you want on your cooler plus it’s lga, 1700 compatible right out of the box. So learn more at the links below so the reason there’s still a cmos battery is because there’s still a cmos chip, but instead of handling the bios nowadays, it’s mostly just responsible for time keeping just like a regular old wrist watch. Your computer needs power of some sort if you want to keep accurate time so that battery ensures your computer’s clock will tick away properly, even if you’ve left it unplugged for an extended period and the fact that the lithium cell looks like the battery you put in Your watch is just a nice bonus, but, interestingly many servers can keep time accurately without a cmos battery, even if the power goes out instead of using a cmos chip to keep time locally servers often connect to an ntp server at boot time. Ntp stands for network time protocol, which is used to connect to a different server over the internet to fetch the time accurately.
This isn’t commonly used on home pcs, though, so that little battery on your motherboard is still quite important. In fact, if you remove it, you’ll probably find that your bios settings will still reset just like they did in the old days, i’m assuming because of tradition just kidding. That was a joke, but actually not really, because people were so used to removing the battery.
As a means of resetting the bios for so long, most pc manufacturers simply kept this functionality in place as an easy way to clear settings. Of course, there are a good number of motherboards out there that feature a clear cmos button, either on the board itself or on the rear. I o that will also reset your bios settings, though its name is technically a misnomer.
Now the reason they kept, the terminology was again because folks have just been so used to using cmos as a synonym for bios that the name just stuck, and although all this may be a little confusing. The good news is that the cmos battery isn’t something you have to worry about very often they typically last for years before they might need to be replaced. But you might want to have a copy of your bios settings saved somewhere anyways, especially if you’re the type of person to spend hours getting your ram timings just right. You can’t get that time back, but you might as well have your bios settings. But i appreciate you spending the time that you can never get back to watch this video hey like the video, if you liked it dislike it, if you dislike it check out our other videos and comment below with video suggestions, don’t forget to subscribe and follow to Techwiki, which is the this channel right here, .