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Are you looking for the fastest monitor money can buy, with a refresh rate that dwarfs all others? Well, technically you should be hunting for a used IIyama Vision Master Pro 512, as this YouTube channel has just forced the old CRT beast to a frankly astonishing 700 Hz.

This isn’t RetroGamingBase’s first dalliance with the Vision Master, as it’s previously managed to push this particular unit to 500 Hz, a mere 40 Hz away from literally the fastest gaming monitor currently available, the Asus ROG Swift Pro PG248QP.

That display does manage a full 1080p resolution, however, whereas the poor IIyama was cranked down to 320 x 200 in order to achieve the effect. You could game on it though, at least!

This time around, even more extreme measures were applied. After a successful test of 600 Hz at 150p resolution (in which the monitor refused to display its actual refresh rate on the built-in interface), the Vision Pro was then run at 700 Hz at a magnificently letterboxed 320 x 120 resolution.

After an initial test, showing a hugely cut down confirmation window with the settings mostly obscured, RetroGamingBase decided to call it quits before potentially damaging the monitor itself. CRT monitors in good condition are increasingly hard to find, so now the hunt is on to find a model that’s not in such good shape for some actual gaming testing.

That’s if Windows 11 will display correctly at such a low resolution, a notion which the channel expresses some doubt towards. Still, it turns out the old CRT really can beat the fresh-faced newcomers in terms of raw refresh rate performance, even if you do end up reduced to looking at your programs through a tiny fraction of the available screen space.

And what a screen it is. According to the IIyama Vision Master Pro’s product page, it features a screen size of 22 inches, and, err, nothing else but a broken PDF link. Some more digging reveals a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536, a built-in four port USB hub (luxury!) and a stated weight of 65 lbs.

At which, my back twinges in memory. I know I’m far from the only one that remembers heaving CRT monitors into the back of a car to take to that much missed event, the late-night LAN party, in my much misspent youth.

Back then, we dreamed of flat screens. Little did we know that all these years later, it’d be these big clunkers throwing out refresh rates that makes even the most modern monitors look slow on their feet.