Running LCD at higher than factory recommended resolutions?

[Hannover]

I was playing around with the nVidia custom monitor settings in Windows 7 with my Acer GD235hz (23.6", 1080p, 120hz) and I wanted to see if the monitor would display 1200 vertical pixels instead of the native (and supposed max) 1080. Well, it did display 1200 pixels just fine though I now had black borders on the right and left of my screen.

I decided to get daring and see what would happen at 1600 Vertical pixels and that worked as well only now the black bars on the left and right were even bigger. Desktop size definitely looked like it was displaying that resolution, this did not look like interpolation. The text was clear and sharp.

Now here's where I got really brave. I decided that since I could get to the 1600 pixels, the side bars must be because I left the horizontal at 1920 pixels so I started changing it.

I got all the way to 2880x1600 pixels before the nVidia software told me my monitor did not support any resolutions higher than that. I had an awesome pic and a huge desktop on one monitor. I even played some Arkham Origins and Battlefield 4 at that resolution (Plays at about 24fps with all settings maxed on two GTX670's in sli)

And yes, games do recognize these custom resolutions once you add them in the nVidia control panel.

So the obvious question is, am I burning up my monitor by attempting to run at these resolutions? There is something kind of fun about playing Battlefield at that crazy ass resolution and only using a single monitor. The pic and effects are amazing and I only have to turn things down a little bit to hit over 30fps. I'm actually thinking of picking up another one of these if it's something that can be sustained but not if I'm going to fry it. I do have to drop the refresh to 60hz once I get over about 2400 horizontal pixels but the monitor doesn't seem to act funny and the monitor on-screen menu reports refresh and resolutions accurately even though it's way above spec.

Comments from the experts out there? I've tried this many times in the past but the monitors would usually just blank out or display something like 'Out of sync/range' when you tried to go past spec. I am completely surprised how high this one can go!

 

[manofchalk]

You can overclock a monitors refresh rate, but not the resolution.

Your not getting a higher resolution, no amount of software wizardry will change the number of physical pixels in your screen. What its really doing is just rendering the increased "software" resolution and displaying it on your screen, downscaling it to do so. You get a far larger FOV in-game because it thinks it has the pixels to do it.
The black side bars are because your running a different Aspect Ratio to the monitors native resolution (16:9), so it cant fit the shape of the screen properly. If you increased the software resolution to 2560x1440 it would properly fit the screen.

You wouldnt be damaging the monitor by doing this, you arent really doing anything to the monitor itself other than forcing its display controller to downscale what it receives from the GPU.

 

[photonboy]

I'm repeating a bit here:

1) As mentioned, there are a FIXED number of pixels on the screen. In your case 1920x1080 of them or about 2 million.

2) If you are at "2560x1440" then this is the resolution in video memory only. The GPU or Monitor has to scale that back down to 1920x1080 to fit your screen.

3) POINTLESS.
Anti-Aliasing techniques already upscale images to resample and scale down again.

4) Damage monitor?
Any time you force a device to do something it's not designed for you run the risk of damage either immediately or later.

It's like overclocking a CPU. It works, but the lifetime is often cut in half.