Dead CMOS Battery?

Yesterday and today I have been having issues with getting my machine to start from a cold boot on battery. It beeps like the video card isn't detected, but if I plug it back into the wall, and let it sit for a second, the bios resets(have to switch back from raid to ahci) and it boots up fine. any help with troubleshooting this would be very helpful as I kinda need this thing to be able to cold boot off battery.

 

BigT, i don't think its a dead cmos battery because if your cmos battery was dead, you would have issues starting it up whether you plug it in or not.

however, cmos batteries going bad do have some of the symptoms you describe.

You know what dude, keep your computer on for 24hrs. In that time pay attention to your system info like date and time. Also see if any cmos errors get triggered. Also check to see if you suddenly have a hard time getting system info like how much space is left on your harddrive or how much ram you have

Usually with bad cmos batteries, you'll get some system instability like random shutdowns

 

Yea, the time always resets back to 2010 so i have to fix that as well. Its really strange no random shutdowns or anything... yet. My give dell a shout later and see if they can figure it out. I got complete warranty after all.

 

Definitely give them a call and see if they can send you a battery...but if it gets to be too much of a hassle, those lithium batteries you can get at any dollar store for...you guessed it, $1

 

It did it again when I got home so I ran the diagnostics once I had the machine plugged in for a few minutes and everything was fine? Other than the cmos battery, im not sure what else could be the issue. ill check the voltage at school on the battery tomorrow and see if its dead, and if it is swap it out for free. Sometimes it good to be going to school for I.T.

 

well I ended up replacing the CMOS battery myself and the machine was back to normal for a while, but it started doing the exact same thing again. gonna call dell here in a bit, but idk if i should ask for a new mobo/video card or a whole new system?

 

sorry to hear that BigT.

I think you should ask for whatever fixes your problem...probably a new mobo.

but i see you have the 6990m installed now? Working good?

 

Dell is sending another CMOS battery to try and fix it, so far the 6990m is working good, but im confused on idle temps. according to HWinfo its idling at around 60C and it won't go down even with manual fans at full blast.

 

What are your 6990m load temps?

60c isn't terrible...maybe 5c higher than most 6990m's on idle

 

70 underload maxxed out, ran furmark and it says like 104C while hwinfo reports 70C. I'm really confused.

 

woah! 104c on furmark? i get 67c.

It could be the version # you are using. See if you can download Furmark 1.9.1

 

I had 1.9.2, gonna run the older one and see what happens, but these are the temps below and its why im so confused.

 

That's amazing! The card isn't shutting down? You aren't freezing?

If those are your temps, they are waaay too high. If the card is still performing like champ, then it could be a bad sensor on the card

 

it works for a few seconds and then the fps gets cut in half, I put the Hwinfo in there because it only hits 70C max even while furmark is running.

 

What are your temps when you do a 3dmark11 run? (leave hwinfo running in the background)

 

Is your heatsink making contact with the thermal paste?

Maybe you have too much thermal padding?

Did you do a clean windows install? Stock Dell drivers?

 

figured it out. Had to take the plastic black piece of take off the GPU heatsink since the 460m had a different die and now im sitting at around 75C for a furmark run. Gonna get some better paste than the AS5 i got on there now though.

 

nice job man! enjoy the new beast

 

time for some benchmark runs

 

awesome BigT! Yes, let the fun begin

 

the new card has also seemed to fix the CMOS issue as well. Wonder if i could get a 560m replacement for the 460m down the road when I get bored with messing with this card?

 

na, whats the point lol...6990 is like 50% more powerful than the 560m

 

yea true lol guess ill just keep it until they run out of 560's and have to give me something else.