Hardware Question - A7N8X oddity

[Michael A. Peters]

A7N8X Deluxe w/ Athlon XP 2700+
Homebuilt system

Woke it up from sleep - and it rebooted. Thought it might be a power
flux or something.
While booting, went elsewhere - came back and it was off.
Pressed reset switch and watched - bios was claiming it was an XP1500
and was over frequency.

I had remembered that happening way back when I built the thing, and I
had to change a setting in the bios it get it to see the cpu properly as
an XP2700+ and boot.

Anyone heard of anything like this?
Seems the bios forgot its settings. If it was a mac I would suspect bad
pram battery ...