ScriptAsylum is right. although the flickering is a thing of the past unless you use a REALLY old monitor, my normal refresh is 1280 by 1024 at 60hz.
As for damage to the monitor N-E-V-E-R manually set a refresh rate higher then your monitor's maximum, most monitors nowadays will not let you do this anyone, they will automatically revert to the working on or you'll get a black screen with a box that says frequency out of range.
My friend set his monitor a few years ago to a high refresh rate which it didn't support and it wasn't longer then 2 days before the monitor fried!