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Repair, disassembly, and troubleshooting information for the Xbox Series X, Microsoft's 4K gaming console. The Xbox Series X was released alongside its companion console, the Xbox Series S, on November 10th, 2020.

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Can I Fit A CMOS Battery On The Xbox Series X?

This is an absolutely stupid question, but I was planning to clean my Xbox and reapply thermal paste, and I was looking at the teardown for some clues of where to clean, and I came across this particular picture the southbridge board and I'm TOYALLY confused.

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I'm not such a PC guy; I mainly play console games and couldn't assemble a PC myself because my parents are afraid that I might electrocute myself. HOWEVER, I do know what a CMOS battery slot on a motherboard looks like. And the Xbox's southbridge board have a shape that looks EXACTLY like a CMOS battery slot. That got me wondering: Can I put a CMOS battery on an Xbox, for whatever reason? Why does it even have a place for that at all? Why not utilize that space for something else but instead leave a space for a CMOS battery that they don't even install??? Also, there seems to be a lot of components missing on that particular board, since there's so many solder pads and nothing on them. Do Xboxes actually have a BIOS when Microsoft designed it but later decided that it doesn't really need BIOS at all?
?????
I'm totally clueless of what Microsoft is doing. Any ideas?

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The battery slot is for devkit and godbox timekeeping, those things have capabilities certificates signed extremely tight, usually only valid for a couple of days. If the certificate time slots are out of tolerance, the machines will require server re-authentication when booting. If that fails, the bootslot becomes locked and a full system restore is needed. To avoid such headaches, those custom-made kits have the CMOS battery installed.

Retail units don't have this problem so the clock battery isn't needed.

The missing eMMC chip is present on Xbox One for hypervisor boot and console identity certificates. On Xbox Series consoles, these boot files are placed on the SSD instead so MS can omit the eMMC chip to save $2 per console, at the cost of permanently bricking the console if the SSD goes bad.

You can probably solder some of the parts on, however if any software changes are required to utilize them, there is nothing you can do as the console remains hackproof at this point.

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