help -- Broken monitor

hey, my monitor just recently died on me and I was wondering if anyone could give some advice as to if I should try for a repair or just buy a new monitor. Monitor is a 17 inch flat panel Gem 821-A (I believe, don't have it here with me) and I have had it for 3 years and it worked great (I was pretty much in love with it). The symptoms of the malfunction began with the monitor flickering about 10 hours before it 'died'. By died I mean that the monitor is recieves power but doesn't recieve any signal from the computer (thus it turns off due to it's auto-powersaving features). My diagnostics so far have been to try a different monitor with the computer (worked fine...though the monitor was of a different input type (I don't know enough about computers to name but it had regular pins in addition to a long horizontal pin)) and I tried a different monitor cable with no success. So I believe this means that something within the monitor itself went bad or the monitor cable input on my video card went bad. Any suggestions?