DIYbanter - View Single Post - Why aren't computer clocks as accurate as cheap quartz watches?

wrote:
James Sweet wrote:

I have one PC that will lose or gain hours at a time if the machine goes
into standby, another that does ok but still drifts enough that I have
to use a utility to keep it in sync with the atomic clock. On the other
hand a Sun workstation that I fire up occasionally to play with keeps
excellent time, even after sitting unplugged for 6 months it's usually
within a few seconds but then it was originally $25K.

The only PC motherboards I've seen that consistently kept accurate time
all had Dallas clock chips in them, and some of those chips were still
running properly from their internal lithium cells (permanently
encapsulated) 10 years later.

Yeah the Sun has a Dallas in it, in fact I had to hack in a new battery
in one of them as the original went dead and modern chips won't work in
it. Come to think of it I had a 486 PC with a Dallas, I think that was
the most recent though.