Windows Task Manager Will Now Show RAM Speed In MT/s

Windows Task Manager Will Now Show RAM Speed In MT/s

For decades, people have referred to RAM speeds in MHz (short for Megahertz) to indicate the module’s speeds. However, this is technically incorrect due to the nature of modern RAM designs, and Microsoft is updating the Task Manager to reflect that with the new measurement unit, MT/s (mega transfers per second).

Image: BleepingComputer

The ‘DDR’ in DDR5 RAM stands for Double Data Rate, which executes two transfers per clock cycle. Before DDR was a thing, the mainstream standard was SDRAM (Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory). Just like its name suggests, every clock cycle the modules perform one transfer, and the industry hasn’t quite moved on from using MT/s and MHz interchangeably since DDR was introduced in the early 2000s.

Fun fact: if you have CPU-Z installed on your PC, you can see the correct values reporting your RAM speed as half the number that it is “rated”. For example, if your RAM is advertised as DDR5-6000, the software will report 3000MHz. Most RAM manufacturers today have largely adopted a new way of advertising RAM speeds by a number followed by DDR generation (such as DDR5-6000) to avoid confusion.

With Task Manager adopting the new unit of measurement, this should eliminate one of the most common misconceptions surrounding memory speeds. Currently, the change is applied to Windows 11 Insider build 22635.3570 for the beta channel, so the update should soon arrive via Windows Update. You can read the full changelog by clicking on this link.

Source: BleepingComputer

Pokdepinion: That’s one misconception soon to be solved.