Samsung appears to be the SSD brand to beat (for years on end, including 2016), and OCZ and SanDisk are maintaining good quality. Intel appears to be a solid choice. I do not have a SSD yet myself, but if I were to get one today, I'd go for a Samsung. Samsung's quality appears to be consistent and solid, and they appear multiple times on the top lists.
Tom's Hardware will generally steer you right. Newegg is currently running special prices on Samsung's
750 and
850 series 250 GB SSDs.
I have had both EVGA and MSI NVidia cards, and I've never had a problem with them at all. I think I had a good Gigabyte card too. They last forever for me, so I haven't had to buy a lot. Even when one computer breaks down, the card will work in a new computer.
I have never had a problem with mismatched cards. I use an EVGA card on a MSI motherboard without any delays or hiccups. At this price range, standard interfaces should keep things compatible between manufacturers. It's one of their selling points.
Overclocking: AMD processors come pre-overclocked. For overclocked video cards, look for "OC" in the model number. Generally, if "OC" is anywhere in there, it will be pre-overclocked for you. Also look for "Super Clock" (EVGA likes to use this phrase.)
Newegg can help you look for overclocked cards.
Most new NVidia cards are going to have G-Sync, so you will probably find a good investment by getting a G-Sync compatible monitor to go with it. (It's a standard, so you don't have to match up the monitor brand with the card brand.) This kind of monitor will update its image when the video card tells it that a new update is ready, instead of demanding a video image update at a regular rate like 120 Hz. It's still going to update fast, but it might update 119 times per second or 122 times per second, depending on what is best for the card, instead of sticking to 120 times per second, regardless of the video card. And what is best for the card will yield a smoother output for your eyes. Such monitors are about 3 times the price of their non-synced cousins, but they are generally big and high-quality.
Edit:
I haven't ever read about anybody upgrading their video card cooling. I have seen replacement video card cooling fans, but those are replacement items, meant to replace broken fans. Usually, the stuff that comes built-in on the card is good enough and relies on you creating a cool interior. That's why you want to create a good air flow path, so that the video card can vent properly. With that said, I have seen liquid cooling kits that have a second cooling plug that attaches to the backside of video cards. However, I don't know anything about those, including their effectiveness. And of course, any cooling add-ons may make it difficult to have everything together. So if you wanted custom cooling and dual-video card SLI at the same time, that might be hard to pull-off, because the SLI motherboard will generally put large PCI-E slots together, so that multiple video cards are close together, side-by-side.