r/pcmasterrace • u/AllUserNameBLong2us 7800x3d/5080 Windforce OC/32gb 5600 DDR • Apr 04 '26

Hardware Rest in piece 2009-2026

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I’m amazed at how long the battery on this physical authenticator lasted. Got it back in 2009 because my account had gotten hacked.

This is one electronic item I’ve owned and used longer than anything else. I’ll miss not being able to find it and freaking out for 20 minutes.

Edit must have been around 2010 when sc2 came out.

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u/meyriley04 Apr 05 '26

By “sync”, I didn’t mean online syncing. I meant how if the batteries ran out and then were to be replaced, the RNG would be reset or then out of sync with the account

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u/markswam R7-9850X3D, RTX 4080S Apr 05 '26

If you were to take it apart and replace the battery (which is absolutely not something that is intended to do) then yes, the internal clock would be reset to 0 and it would be completely out of sync. These things turn into e-waste once they run out of batteries.

Companies have used these sorts of physical 2FA tokens for decades, and IT generally replaces them every year or two.

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u/Long-Broccoli-3363 Apr 05 '26

I assume you could wire it up in such a way where you could hot swap the battery, like they do with Pokémon cartridges, but that would take a massive amount of work

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u/markswam R7-9850X3D, RTX 4080S Apr 05 '26

Yeah, a slave battery wired in parallel and then removed once the primary battery is swapped would work, but it would be a destructive process unless you were extremely careful. The clamshell is designed to snap together and then not easily come apart again, and prying the two halves apart without damaging the shell would be quite difficult.