"Overclocking failed!" Message at computer startup

Mine will do that almost any time I unplug it. I have no idea why. I just go to BIOS, change nothing, save an exit and it boots right up.

Steve of course you have checked the volts of the Cmos battery.
Steve does this happen on a particular computer with a particular power supply?

I turn off all power to my computers and anything that is plugged into them every time I'm not using the computers and I not have a bios problem of any kind. The Bios stay as set.

Knock on wood, plastic and pet my cat hope nothing goes wrong now I have spoken.

It's a pretty common occurrence with ASUS boards, Jack. Every ASUS board I've had has done it at least one point in time. The ones at work do it, too. I don't know why it happens, but it isn't a big deal. Like Steve said, you just go into BIOS and save, and you're good.

My two ASUS boards in my specs haven't done it so it's pretty random it seems. Like you say though, no big deal.

The good news is it only happens to some and it's very easy to fix.
The bad news is we don't know why it happens and probable never will.

I've got lots of Asus boards.
That has never happened to me, unless I am playing with the BIOS settings and deserve it.
Just lucky I guess.

I never messed with the BIOS on the board I had it happen on and have messed with BIOS on the two boards it hasn't happened on. Complete randomness.

Does it happen if you Restore Optimal Defaults and then don't change any settings (except perhaps AHCI)?

There was a guy a while back that had the problem when he set the memory controller to XMP mode to get full speed on his RAM. I suspect there was a problem with one or more of the sticks.

In my limited experience overclocking one of the boards, it happens when there is a problem at post, whether it be memory, or CPU related. It will bark at you that "OCing has failed, press F1" and the BIOS will set itself to safe values for the CPU and/or RAM.

That's if you're overclocking.

Under normal use, with my other boards, the message has been totally random, and very rarely, it will reset my RAM to 1333 MHz if it was set higher. The rest of the BIOS settings it won't touch. But it does happen under normal defaults with only ACHI set. That's how my machine at work is set (ASUS M4A79XTD EVO), and I have it happen at least twice a year.