Second monitor has really bad screen tearing

Hey! My laptop monitor looks fine but my second monitor is having crazy screen flickers. It’s almost unusable and it hurts my eyes if I look at it for long. I’m really not sure what to do, and quite lost. Should I ditch the noveau drivers and install proprietary Nvidia drivers? If so, how can I go about doing this?
Here is the result of lspci |grep -E "VGA|3D":

`02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation C79 [GeForce 9400M] (rev b1)`

The monitor is being plugged in via DVI (display port to hdmi, hdmi to DVI) just bought all of the wires and adapters and they are in good condition since they work with other computers.

As I’ve said, I’m really lost. I’m open for all suggestions!
Thanks in advance!

Hi, @gravatio!

From the top of my head, it can be a driver issue, it also can be an issue with connection you’re using (converting DP to HDMI, then HDMI to DVI).

If you have such an option, try testing it by connecting your laptop to another display, preferably with HDMI input (so that you can skip HDMI to DVI cable), it can be a TV set (most of them have HDMI input now).

Testing proprietary driver is certainly an option too.

Here’s a link to FedoraMagazine beginner-friendly article on doing this:

And here’s a link on rpmfusion’s how-to (which I prefer):

https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA

Both will provide you with the same driver from the same source (rpmfusion repository). I think that couple steps in the article are unnecessary (check the comments section), but it will work regardless. rpmfusion’s how-to is straight to the point and have some pointers to issues article doesn’t cover.

It looks like for your GeForce 9400M GPU you’ll need legacy nvidia-340xx drivers, not the latest ones – but I suggest to verify it once more on NVidia’s website. Check which version of drivers is available for your GPU, but don’t download them from NVidia.

If it’s the case you’ll use command from this section of how-to.

Feel free to ask additional details about driver installation (or removal) if you need it.