How do I unlock my monitor? [Remove Hz limit]

Talk about overclocking displays at a higher refresh rate. This includes homebrew, 165Hz, QNIX, Catleap, Overlord Tempest, SEIKI displays, certain HDTVs, and other overclockable displays.
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RealNC
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How do I unlock my monitor? [Remove Hz limit]

Post by RealNC » 17 Jan 2014, 12:38

Reading this topic:

http://forums.blurbusters.com/viewtopic ... t=10#p1767

Made me wanna try to OC my monitor as well. I have a Samsung XL2370. Problem is, it's not going past 64Hz. Samsung has a safety lock that must be disabled. There should be a hidden menu in the OSD where this lock can be disabled. I found a post (https://osu.ppy.sh/forum/p/2268530) where someone with the same monitor says that this hidden menu is accessed by holding down the menu button for 5 seconds. But it doesn't work here; if I hold down that button for 5 seconds, all it does is lock the menu so that people can't change anything in it anymore (so that they don't mess with color settings and such.)

I Googled a lot and found another hidden menu ("Service Menu") that can be activated by setting brightness and contrast to 0 and then holding down the enter button in the "Information" section of the OSD. This works, but the service menu has no such setting in it. It just displays the use time of the monitor (14 thousand hours, wow) and the only settings in it are "Pixel Shift" and "Hotplug time".

I'm stuck :-/
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Re: How do I unlock my monitor?

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 17 Jan 2014, 12:50

RealNC wrote:Samsung has a safety lock that must be disabled.
Safety locks are quite annoying.
They are VERY hard to disable.
They are there to protect the electronics from being damaged.
AMD and Intel have now made overclocking a big profit industry. NVIDIA, too.
ASUS and BENQ needs to begin doing the same, IMHO -- remove safety locks on all monitors.
Monitor overclocking rarely permanently damage LCDs, and are rarer than burnt overclocked CPUs and GPUs.

Today's high end gaming monitors without safety locks (e.g. QNIX QX2710 Evolution 2, X-Star DP2710, Catleap 2B, Overlord Tempest X270OC) are easily overclockable to a 2:1 overclocking margin, and the recent Blur Busters Forum discovery of highly overclockable laptop LCDs that can do a 3:1 overclocking margin, show that monitor refresh rate headroom are now far beyond the antiquated 60Hz norm.

I agree that it is time to give monitors overclock freedom, today -- Let's figure out how to remove the locks of various monitor -- Display tweakers needs to post detailed instructions on how to unlock the monitors. I'm not sure how to solve your Service Menu problem, but I agree that refresh rate locks on modern monitors are now very annoying.
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Re: How do I unlock my monitor? [Remove Hz limit]

Post by RealNC » 02 Feb 2014, 21:34

Well, turns out that the monitor's lock allows for some overclocking. The problem was the NVidia driver. It silently ignores pixel clocks abore 165MHz. It still tells you that you're using more than that, but it's outright lying to you. I had to use ToastyX's NVIDIA Pixel Clock Patcher:

http://www.monitortests.com/forum/Threa ... ck-Patcher

It worked. Now I can go up to 77Hz without issues. The monitor still complaints if I want to go above it though. 85Hz works, but an OSD pops up in the middle of the screen that tells me:

"This mode is not optimal. Recommended mode: 1920x1080@60Hz"

I can make that OSD disappear by pressing the menu button once, but after two minutes, it comes back with a vengeance. It switches the monitor back to a 60Hz mode and the only thing that is displayed is the above OSD message, this time floating around on the screen, juuust in case I didn't notice it the first time. Goddammit...

Trying to go above 85Hz induces that behavior immediately; the monitor goes to 60Hz and the OSD tells you about the "optimal" mode.

Using reduced timings doesn't help either. In fact, the monitor's lock doesn't seem to care about the pixel clock or the horizontal refresh rate. Pixel clock can be 180MHz or 220MHz, hrefresh can be 80kHz or 100kHz... it doesn't give a damn. All it cares about is 77Hz. If you dare go above that, it locks you out.

This is a bummer, since the monitor's panel seems to be a quite fast one (Samsung was selling it as a "2ms" monitor, and Prad.de measured a 7.7ms black-gray pixel reaction time.) It's such a shame that Samsung then crippled this monitor with a vertical refresh lock :-/ And it behaves quite nice at 85Hz too (before it shows you the middle finger a couple of minutes later, that is.) There's no corruption or color degradation or blurring or any other artifacts to be seen, and no frame skipping.

So, still looking for a way to bypass this stupid thing.
Last edited by RealNC on 06 Feb 2014, 13:04, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How do I unlock my monitor? [Remove Hz limit]

Post by Black Octagon » 06 Feb 2014, 11:39

Nvm

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Re: How do I unlock my monitor? [Remove Hz limit]

Post by srsbsns » 17 Feb 2014, 18:15

OP, glad you were able to get it overclocked to 77hz. I also have this monitor and I'm able to reach 77hz but no pixel clock software is needed. The interface of the monitor is single link DVI only so you were hitting the limits of it. If you just use HDMI you will find you can hit 77hz with ease.

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Re: How do I unlock my monitor? [Remove Hz limit]

Post by Staxtis » 24 Mar 2016, 13:57

Hello man..
I just saw your post..can you tell me if you manage anything?I got the OC GURU 2 from nvidia and when i open the oc monitor i cant go above 60HZ...i dont have the option...i went to creat a custom profile and the highest HZ that i can go are 66HZ but on OC GURU 2 sais again 60hz...can i do something to go on 75-80-85 hz?thank you very much


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