I have piriform speccy and cpu-z and they both show i have 800 mhz ram but win task manager shows 1600 mhz speed...you might think it is supported speed but nop, its just speed.why is that?
2 Answers
Although I can't say for the Piriform Speccy software, I do know that CPU- Z reports half of the speed of what your RAM is. Read this webpage for a better explanation why (specifically, the answer submitted by MRFS and outlw6669).
It deals with the definition of what DDR memory is. DDR stands for double data rate. DDR memory is meant to transfer data twice per clock cycle. So if you have RAM that is rated for 1600Mhz, CPU-Z should report 800Mhz (simply multiply by 2 to get 1600Mhz).
To put it simply, Task Manager shows one speed, and CPU-Z (and likely Piriform) report another, but technically, both are correct.
Speccy and cpu-z are showing the actual clock speed provided to the RAM, while task manager is showing the effective clock speed (DDR memory is Double Data Rate, so you get effective 2x the clock speed = 1600 Mhz).
With that said, task manager is terrible at providing accurate CPU or RAM clock speeds. This usually comes into play if you change the timing of your RAM and/or CPU for overclocking reasons.
I was going to provide a couple of links outlining people with similar issues, but instead just google it - there are hundreds and hundreds of similar complaints about the speeds reported on task manager for all versions of windows.
