If you have your brightness maxed it will die in 2005 vs lasting until 2008. Usually it's higher frequency which blows the electronics, but the phosphor might burn a tad quicker with longer times per line so keep brightness down.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-11, 04:31:

If you have your brightness maxed it will die in 2005 vs lasting until 2008. Usually it's higher frequency which blows the electronics, but the phosphor might burn a tad quicker with longer times per line so keep brightness down.

2005 is when I bought it... I'm not sure I follow. 🤣

I will do a bit more research on this before I start using it at 15khz. I have a feeling it would work fine, but I do have to wonder why they would prevent it from running at those resolutions if it is capable.

do you have any evidence that it will actually sync down to 15kHz? or are you basing all this on the fact the minimum hsync freq is adjustable?

"adjustable" still implies that the range of adjustment is finite,there is a long way from 15 to 29

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-01-19, 04:50:

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-11, 04:31:

If you have your brightness maxed it will die in 2005 vs lasting until 2008. Usually it's higher frequency which blows the electronics, but the phosphor might burn a tad quicker with longer times per line so keep brightness down.

2005 is when I bought it... I'm not sure I follow. 🤣

I will do a bit more research on this before I start using it at 15khz. I have a feeling it would work fine, but I do have to wonder why they would prevent it from running at those resolutions if it is capable.

I was pitching it 3 years from intro date I think. What I was trying to say is that if you ran it lowest frequency max brightness for 3 years as a daily driver, on for large chunk of the day, it might be getting burned and dim in 3 years. Official modes are probably optimized for their beam output to avoid that.

Anyway, the takeaway is that it's slightly bad for the monitor maybe, but you'd have to do a whole lot of slightly to age it more rapidly than you'd notice vs using it at desktop res.

maxtherabbit wrote on 2026-01-19, 13:35:

do you have any evidence that it will actually sync down to 15kHz? or are you basing all this on the fact the minimum hsync freq is adjustable?

"adjustable" still implies that the range of adjustment is finite,there is a long way from 15 to 29

No, I don't. In fact, yesterday I asked over at the crtgaming subreddit and after a rather confusing discussion where I learned some things I was wrong about and others kept misunderstanding what I was trying to do, it seems like it is probably not worth trying to do this, even if there was a way to make it work.

I somehow never realized that anything displayed on a VGA monitor that is running below standard VGA resolutions (640x480@60, 640x400@70, etc.) is scan-doubled by the VGA card to a VGA resolution to meet the 31.5kHz minimum requirement. So, what I thought was excellent picture quality at 320x200 on a big huge CRT is actually a 640x480@60Hz signal after being scan-doubled by my VGA card. I am told that if I were to see a non scan-doubled 320x200 image on this monitor the scan lines would be so thick it would look awful. This makes sense to me after understanding it better, and it also makes sense why the manufacturer would not allow this even if it doesn't break anything.

Also, someone else said they tried lowering the limits on a 2070SB and it didn't work. They were using what he described as a MiSTer FPGA RGBHV setup to output 15.7kHz horizontal and 59.8Hz vertical and the monitor said "out of range". So, I guess the consolemods.org page is intended to be used only to increase the limits to achieve higher refresh rates for various purposes. Lowering it wouldn't be that useful if 15kHz isn't achievable.