How to overclock your monitor

Over­clock­ing the mon­i­tor matrix makes sense only if you have a fair­ly fast video card. Oth­er­wise, this activ­i­ty is not par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful and prac­ti­cal. Mon­i­tor over­clock­ing is need­ed in order to increase the refresh rate, get rid of hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal image arti­facts, and also increase the clar­i­ty of the dis­play in dynam­ic scenes.

Usu­al­ly mon­i­tors are over­clocked with a stock frame rate of 50–60 Hz. It can be increased to 70–80 Hz. It makes no sense to over­clock mon­i­tors at 144 Hz — it will only be pos­si­ble to increase this para­me­ter by 5–10%, which will not visu­al­ly improve any­thing.

It is also worth not­ing that inex­pen­sive dis­plays with a low mar­gin of “per­for­mance” can only be over­clocked by 10–15%. Increas­ing from 60 Hz to 65 Hz will not make a spe­cial “weath­er”, so the game is not worth the can­dle.

But, nev­er­the­less, we will tell you how to over­clock the mon­i­tor.

Instructions on how to overclock your monitor

Before over­clock­ing, it is worth check­ing the inter­face through which the screen is con­nect­ed. Some con­nec­tion meth­ods do not allow you to increase the “frame rate” above the max­i­mum sup­port­ed:

1. DVI at Full HD res­o­lu­tion — 65 Hz;

2. HDMI 1.4 at Full HD res­o­lu­tion — 75 Hz.

3. But HDMI 2.0, Dis­play­Port, Thun­der­bolt 3.0 and lap­top matri­ces can be eas­i­ly over­clocked to any desired val­ue.

Matrix over­clock­ing meth­ods vary depend­ing on the video card used. So, at NVIDIA, the desired refresh rate is set direct­ly in the con­trol pan­el. But own­ers of AMD and Intel video cards will have to down­load a third-par­ty pro­gram.

How to overclock monitor with nvidia graphics card

An impor­tant fea­ture of the dis­plays is that they are not equipped with a built-in refresh rate con­troller. There­fore, they are over­clocked through the graph­ics card set­tings. And it is espe­cial­ly easy for own­ers of NVIDIA graph­ics accel­er­a­tors to do this.

Instruc­tion:

1. Launch the NVIDIA Con­trol Pan­el by dou­ble-click­ing on the tray icon or once by right-click­ing any­where on the desk­top;

2. Go to the “Change Per­mis­sion” tab;

3. Click the “Set­tings” but­ton;

4. Check the box next to “Enable modes not sup­port­ed by the dis­play”;

5. Click the “Cre­ate your own res­o­lu­tion” but­ton.

6. A win­dow will open in which you can already con­fig­ure the refresh rate. Increase it by 5 Hz at a time, then press the “Test” but­ton. As soon as arti­facts begin to appear on the dis­play after start­ing test­ing, it means that the max­i­mum refresh rate has been reached. Reduce it by 5 Hz and save.

How to overclock a monitor with an AMD or Intel graphics card

And here it is much more dif­fi­cult. AMD sup­ports over­clock­ing any­thing in gen­er­al, but not dis­plays. So you have to down­load a spe­cial pro­gram called the Cus­tom Res­o­lu­tion Util­i­ty.

The main prob­lem with the Cus­tom Res­o­lu­tion Util­i­ty is that it does­n’t have a test mode. The fre­quen­cy is set once and “for­ev­er” (well, that is, until enter­ing safe mode or until fur­ther changes).

Instruc­tion:

1. Cre­ate a sys­tem restore point;

2. Down­load and run the Cus­tom Res­o­lu­tion Util­i­ty (CRU);

3. In the left part of the main pro­gram win­dow, uncheck all the box­es. On the right side, in the Stan­dard res­o­lu­tions sec­tion, click the Delete all but­ton;

4. In the Detailed res­o­lu­tion sec­tion, click the Add but­ton;

5. In the win­dow that appears, set the tim­ing to Auto­mat­ic — LCD reduced, and in the input field near Refresh rate — the desired refresh rate;

6. Restart your com­put­er;

7. Now open the Intel or AMD graph­ics set­tings and set the desired fre­quen­cy.

8. Regard­ing point 5. As in the case with NVIDIA, you need to over­clock grad­u­al­ly. That is, increase the clock speed by 3–5 Hz at a time, then reboot, and so on.

If sud­den­ly after over­clock­ing the screen turns black, then there are two options:

1. Con­nect a sec­ond mon­i­tor and, using it, set the pre­vi­ous work­able clock fre­quen­cy;

2. Boot into safe mode, start the CRU and set the pre­vi­ous work­ing para­me­ters.

3. Since get­ting into safe mode in the Win­dows 10 oper­at­ing sys­tem is a com­plete­ly sep­a­rate quest, it’s eas­i­er to “roll back” to a work­ing state using the restore point that was cre­at­ed in step 1.