New PC Advice - Not sure where to start.

[Zipppy]

I'm in a similar situation, and I bought an Asus sabertooth 990FX motherboard, it's pretty solid.
and I believe AMD will release Piledriver in the fall, and it is claimed to be 20% faster than Bulldozer. Anything is faster than my current triple core however. AMD won't reach Intel, but it's good enough.

From what I've read over the web, is as follows;
If you compare ATI vs NVIDIA on GPUs, you'll find ATI's cards are cheaper and are quicker, but have sub-standard quality on drivers, which bog them down. NVIDIA however, has a bit less performance but has well-optimized drivers, and they cost more, with more power consumption than ATI's, except for the GTX680.