Can a Monitor Overclock crash a Computer? My experiences with a BenQ XL2720Z stable overlock I’ve had for years.

[BenqBuster]

I’ve been overclocking my BenQ XL2720z now for years. The monitor is stable at 220 hz in all situations except for when gaming.

It was running on an older computer i7-4790k + GTX980 Computer. When playing Rocket League for like 20-40minutes, the game would crash screen would go black,
Sometimes it would go back to desktop after crashing, sometimes it would crash the whole computer with a black screen and it would require a hard reset and restart of the computer.

I assumed this issue was just related to my old dusty PC with a possibly a failing power supply.

So I built a brand new PC. I5-12900k + rtx 3070 Ti. Hooked up the BenQ xl2720z, overclocked it, then was excited to play Rocket League again. After a longer player session like an hour ish, it crashed in nearly an identical way. The black screen would appear, the entire computer would hard crash, I could see the GPU fans stop system and system fans go full speed right after the crash. I ran hardware monitors during the session and temps looked fine.

Also, when running the BenQ at regular 144 hz and doing stress tests like Furmark, 3D mark, heaven benchmark etc I saw no indications of crashing. It seems to only happen in Rocket League while using the overclocked monitor.

So my question is, can an overclocked monitor cause the entire PC to hard crash? I wouldn’t think so, but trying the same monitor on two entirely different PCs with the same crash in the same game scenario is making me think so….

Thoughts?

[Chief Blur Buster]

So my question is, can an overclocked monitor cause the entire PC to hard crash? I wouldn’t think so, but trying the same monitor on two entirely different PCs with the same crash in the same game scenario is making me think so….

Not directly, no.

However, there's known domino effects.

For example, it's possible for a display to crash a computer through a buggy video connection (EDID/DisplayID, or other such) -- nonoverclocked prototype displays have frequently done that to me.

So it's not necessarily overclock related, but buggy/out-of-spec video signals that the GPU/drivers are not expecting. Or weird mode changes (e.g. unplug-plug, or hibernating a computer with a prototype display, or Sleep a computer with a prototype display).

Sometimes there are some glitches in a display's video link that puts it out of HDMI/DisplayPort specifications or drivers' expectations, e.g. not expecting a computer to suddenly hibernate in the middle of a video game, or more mudane cases such as simply intentionally putting a computer to sleep (But that the monitor didn't fully implement Sleep logic yet in its firmware). I've seen crashes from that.

If the display overclocking creates some weird conditions (bad plug-n-play data, or corrupted data on the video cable) -- it can crash the GPU / graphics drivers that isn't expecting invalid data from the display. That can cause a computer crash.

None of my overclocks does this to my particular GPU, but I've seen some displays create abberant conditions on video cables that triggers a GPU/driver crash. It's fairly rare though.

Even changes like driver upgrades, motherboard BIOS upgrades, or GPU upgrades, or switching between HDMI-vs-DisplayPort, can cause crash problems to appear/disappear during display overclocking too.

[BenqBuster]

So my question is, can an overclocked monitor cause the entire PC to hard crash? I wouldn’t think so, but trying the same monitor on two entirely different PCs with the same crash in the same game scenario is making me think so….

Not directly, no.

However, there's known domino effects.

For example, it's possible for a display to crash a computer through a buggy video connection (EDID/DisplayID, or other such) -- nonoverclocked prototype displays have frequently done that to me.

So it's not necessarily overclock related, but buggy/out-of-spec video signals that the GPU/drivers are not expecting. Or weird mode changes (e.g. unplug-plug, or hibernating a computer with a prototype display, or Sleep a computer with a prototype display).

Sometimes there are some glitches in a display's video link that puts it out of HDMI/DisplayPort specifications or drivers' expectations, e.g. not expecting a computer to suddenly hibernate in the middle of a video game, or more mudane cases such as simply intentionally putting a computer to sleep (But that the monitor didn't fully implement Sleep logic yet in its firmware). I've seen crashes from that.

If the display overclocking creates some weird conditions (bad plug-n-play data, or corrupted data on the video cable) -- it can crash the GPU / graphics drivers that isn't expecting invalid data from the display. That can cause a computer crash.

None of my overclocks does this to my particular GPU, but I've seen some displays create abberant conditions on video cables that triggers a GPU/driver crash. It's fairly rare though.

Even changes like driver upgrades, motherboard BIOS upgrades, or GPU upgrades, or switching between HDMI-vs-DisplayPort, can cause crash problems to appear/disappear during display overclocking too.

Thanks for the detailed reply. That makes sense. Likely the Monitor OC wouldn't crash a GPU but in those cases possibly. I think I figured out that my crashes are game related now though as other games don't crash at all.