Running 17" LCD higher than 60hz

Hi,
First post to this forum,

I just bought a Samsung 171N 17" for a new box I put together.. So far, I'm quite happy with it, yes, even for gaming.. I find, for what its worth, the shadowing isn't that bad, certainly not distracting enough to prevent me playing on it..
However, one issue I did notices is every now and then I'd get an almost blurry looking sutter for half a second on the screen.. I'm running at 1280x1024, at 60hz, and my frames are sometimes well over the 100fps mark. Is the stutter, "screen tearing"? I don't think I've ever witnessed screen tearing first hand before, so I'm unsure what it should look like..

If this IS screen tearing, I'm assuming the simplest way to combat it is to cap my frames in the game I'm using to my refresh rate? (i.e. 60FPS cap)

Will capping it slightly higher (say 70FPS) still cause eventual tearing, or is it a funcion of the frames being drastically higher than your refresh rate?

Along those same lines, it seems my monitor will only allow me to set to either 60 or 70hz refresh. Is it detrimental at all (picture quality, life of the screen, ghosting/tearing issues, etc) for me to up the refresh rate by those 10hz?

Obviously, I'd like to set the FPS cap as high as I can within the confines of my monitors capabilities; though not at the expense of the life of my screen or quality of the images on it..

Any help would be greatly appreciated..

thanks,

Adam