Have you been using an LCD flat-panel?
Although those things are liked by many, their picture quality, especially the older ones, has a lot to be desired. LCD panels have a limited contrast ratio (the range between light and dark that can be displayed) The result is that bright areas tend to get "washed out" and subtle details are lost.
This effect can be easily demonstrated with what we call in the business a 5% grayscale pattern. This pattern displays grayscale bars from 0 to 100% brightness ranges in 5% increments. LCD monitors will give trouble usually in the brightest and darkest ends of the range, where you will not be able to tell the difference between the first 2-4 and last 2-4 bars. I imagine the background images this board produces are up there in the upper 90% brightness range and were being washed out by a lack of contrast range on your old screen.
Although many of the newer LCD monitors are getting better in respect to contrast ratio issues, they still have a little ways to go. What's even worse is that many of these monitors come out of the box with factory default settings that exhasperate the problem.
Download a test pattern software, and tweak up your new monitor with that, and you'll REALLY see a difference, not just on your grayscale, but also on your colors, and other picture aspects.
I know NEC has one avaliable from their site to download, and so do a few other. In fact, some of the latest video cards have them built into their driver sofware. Righ-clik on your desktop, and select "properties" and find out what you have.
Also, make sure you are running at the native resolution of the display. Digital displays, which includes all flat-panels, only display an exact, specified amount of pixels. If you are attempting to display a higher or lower resolution, your display will need to add, or remove pixes to make it fit the screen, resulting in a lower quality picture.
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