CMOS cheksum bad?

Hi guys, firstly I'll just give my main system spec:

Asus Maximus Formula X38
Intel Q6600
4X2GB G-Skill PC2-6400
Gigabyte Radeon HD4870

For clarity, all components are running stock as the machine is used for work and I need the stability over the extra performance.

I first noticed something odd yesterday when I booted up my machine and, instead of the single beep I'm used to, it gave me multiple beeps. Unfortunately I wasn't listening properly so I am not entirely sure whether it gave me 3 short beeps or 4 (according to the manual 3 would be VGA and 4 is hardware failure). I didn't have the monitor on at the time so I didn't see any POST messages but when I turned it on I was greeted with an option to enter the BIOS, which I did, and took a quick look around and was unable to see anything out of the ordinary. I then left the BIOS and everything booted up fine and I couldn't see any a VGA issue so I thought it was just a random event and thought nothing more of it.

Then again today, upon startup I got the standard single POST beep but it came up with the message: "CMOS checksum bad" and gave me options of F1 to enter setup and F2 to load default settings. I hit F1 and noticed my BIOS was wiped of all settings which I proceeded to re-enter, save and boot up.

I'm a bit confused as to what is going on here as I haven't had these issues before. Is there some program I can check my hardware for problems with, some diagnostics I can run to figure out what the issue is here?

I'd appreciate any help or advice you can offer.

Hey guys thanks for the advice, I hadn't thought of the battery as I was under the impression it wasn't needed when the mains power was connected and on?

I've ordered a couple of the CR2032 batteries from amazon to test out - the annoying thing is that they have to put the battery under my GPU rather than somewhere nice and easy to access :S

I will also keep eyes and ears open on startup for any beeps/post messages/debug codes, admittedly I wasn't prepared for them the first time around!

Thank you both for your help, fingers crossed it's just the battery issue.

I see, thanks for the info Might be a daft question and I'm guessing it has something to do with compatability/standards/protocols/security but I wonder why they don't use some kind of non-volatile memory for storing this kind of information. Anyway, I'll post back how it goes.