Acquiring new 12c887 integrated clock/battery chips?

[SomeGuy]

I recently acquired a Pentium 1 motherboard that has a dead odin 12c887 integrated clock/battery chip, and it hit me I also have several other motherboard with this same chip that haven't died yet but obviously will eventually. Neverminding the illogic of building an unremovable battery in to a clock/cmos chip, I would like to try and replace these with newer ones rather than cutting them up to hack a normal battery in to them.

Looking on e-bay it seems these are still manufactured, but I have some questions:

Most of the sellers seem to be from China. Are these kinds of sellers reliable?

Does anyone here know of any other, better sources for these things?

There are date codes on the chips, and some of the eBay pictures show dates within the last few years. Is there any other good way to determine if the sellers are actually selling recently produce units, and not used junk pulled from old boards? Any experience with these?

Thanks.

 

[njroadfan]

Look for the Dallas DS12887 at your favorite electrical components retailer. It is commonly available. You could add a replaceable battery option as well: http://www.mcamafia.de/mcapage0/dsrework.htm

 

[RaptorZX3]

all my remaining working P1 boards (AOpen AP53 and AP5VM) seem to have those Dallas BIOS battery type, at first i thought it was flash memory. But they still work for now.

 

[jharre]

Jameco Electronics carries the Dallas DS12887 at a reasonable price (about $7):
http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product_10001_10001_133452_-1
They also carry the 12887+ for a few bucks more.

I just received one from them for my PS/2 55SX that worked just fine.