Like you say, the technology is improving all the time. A cheap model now is still a hell of a lot better than any one you could have bought 5 years ago.

Paying a lot more for a monitor just for the possibility of it lasting a few years more seems counter intuitive given your minimal needs.

Compare that to buying cheap models every five years or so and what you're proposing is looking to spend a lot more on what may well in the long run be lower quality. And like I say there's no guarantee that the expensive monitor will outlive the cheaper one.
That's an odd marriage. But sometimes those are the ones that work out best.

Mainstream? They were more mainstream when I bought my present 16:10 a year or so ago.

1.True, and that's what this story will probably end.
2. It's nice to see that hardware accelerated 3dfx logo again :-)

All these problems are solved by IPS panels. The EIZO website will let you filter by them. This website does a good job tracking which monitors have them http://www.pchardwarehelp.com/guides/s-ips-lcd-list.php

You can still get a dead pixel, but I honestly don't have any, even on a 7 year old IPS panel.

They are very good. I've got one and I'm very happy with it. But I think it might be a bit beyond what tburger needs it for. They're practically three times as much after all.

Yeah but going from a decent CRT to a crappy T/N panel (and they are all crappy) is going to be noticeably worse. Besides you'll end up with crappy 16:9 resolution on a T/N panel, sadly. 16:10 is less likely to be a loss of vertical area.

I don't know how many vertical lines you get on your CRT but 16:9 is always 1080, which is quite a bit less than 1200. It does make a difference if you do anything with text. That 120 lines might be enough for the HUD for whatever game you're playing, too. If it really doesn't bother you, count yourself lucky. It bothers the hell out of me and nearly everyone I know. HDTV actually made LCD panels worse.

Gigabyte, Asus and Asrock had such "transition" 775 boards build on VIA 880 Pro/Ultra chipset. They came in 2 variants "standard" AGP with "stripped" PCI Express x4 and vice versa stripped AGP with standard PCIExpressx16...Never had opportunity to have AGP AND PCIE in the same time (gave my AGP R9600 PRO to a nephew) but I'cant see why they would not work.PCI E & PCI 3dfx run fine. As for multi monitor configuration: small apartment, wife, 2 kids - can't be done in that enviroment :-)

That's pretty odd. My current motherboard has a 16x form factor PCIe slot which can only do a fraction of that. Made it a bit of a challenge when I was picking out my most recent video card. Fortunately, it has enough power that I won't need to upgrade it again until I upgrade the motherboard. Probably should've paid closer attention when I was ordering the bare bones kit it came in.

Could be, the manual was somewhat vague on that point. What it specifically says is that the x16 slot only has x8 bandwidth. If it was a 1.0 slot rather than a 2.0 slot, I really wish they would've specifically stated that rather than the more confusing way of stating it.

Which from what I've read could mean that it's a 1.0 slot, but it's rather annoying that the manual doesn't really say that anywhere I could find.