As far as monitors are concerned, I use an Acer 24" widescreen that I have had since March of this year and I am VERY pleased with it. I paid a premium for it back then but they are very reasonably priced now. The picture and clarity are great and overall is a very good gaming display.
Just did a quick test running the numbers on the settings I normally use: Water=3, Effects=1, 16AF, and 4xAA and still 1920x1200.
For Kamikaze they are: Min.28, Max.298 and Avg.84.711
For the Black Death: Min.29, Max.183 and Avg.93.750
I found that 4xAA still looks ok compared to 16XQAA and I get a little bit of a performance gain, but not much. This change is most noticeable during engine startup and when a lot of smoke is present. I like to keep my frames pegged at 60 as often as possible when running V-Sync on (when not testing). I may do more testing at 16XQAA and see how often those frames drop below 60 during normal game play. The thing that really gets to me is flying over large cities! FIFTEEN (15) frames per second!!
That kind of thing should not happen on a rig like this for a game as old as this one...but it does, and I don't know of anyone who has found a way to solve this problem.