Its past time I build myself a new system but I'm horribly out of date when it comes to all the new bells and whistles that are out there.. not to mention processors and video cards / video card setups. So, I'm willing to build everything around the video card itself...

What card/s am I looking at? (medium - high end[SLI? no SLI?])
Whats hot as far as motherboards go?
What is my best value in processors right now?
Can I stuff all of the above into a Mid Tower CoolerMaster Elite or somesuch and get away without heat issues?

Ram / Hard Disks / & Drives seem to be cheap now a days. Is it down to preference?

Thoughts on Windows 7?

here you go

http://techreport.com/articles.x/18042

And there is no reason to not run Windows 7 on modern hardware.

I have to echo the Win7 comments. It's essentially the equivalent of XP SP1 to Vista.

I've had zero issues with it so far. Hell, even installing it was simple, clean and as hands off as was possible.

I went with a AMD quad core with 4 gigs for my latest setup. Intel has better performance but AMD is cheap as holy shit.