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Timepieces last a decade on a shirt button sized battery. Surely you can afford a bit larger battery on a motherboard, probably even a rechargeable one, make the clock sufficiently autonomous from the rest of the system, and make the motherboard not boot when it doesn't have the battery, so you can leave it unattended for a while.

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A decade is roughly the upper limit of specified battery shelf life for cheap batteries. Making the battery bigger doesn't really help much at that point where it's limited by shelf life, not capacity.

There are longer life batteries, but they're _expensive_, e.g. a Tadiran TL-4934, 1Ah, with a shelf life of 40 years will cost ~5$ in bulk.

The CR2032 on a PC motherboard does usually last for about a decade, and the BIOS (or, well, UEFI) will scream about the CMOS battery being dead when you boot it. It will not refuse to boot, but it will tell you that the battery is dead and/or that its settings are corrupt and alert you to change it.

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