Are you willing to build this yourself or how much choice do you have in deciding which parts you get?
About the CPU, here is a comparison of the i7 965 extreme and the 950 (I couldn't find the 960 but assume the 965 should be better) and there isn't much of a gap between the two. If it's much of a price increase I'd say you'd get more for your money elsewhere.
Incidentally, that is a good place to compare different CPUs and GPUs.
For the case, there are better options. If you want a nice case (good looks, noise reduction, and good ventilation) the Antec P183 would be my choice. If you want something cheaper, but still pretty nice (good ventilation, slightly cheaper build) the Antec 300 illusion would be another way to go (personally, I would cut the wire to the blue lights as they look a little 'gamer' to me -- aside from that it's a pretty clean looking case). The Sonata seems a little generic with no real functional advantages.
For the graphics card, the 470 is a very good card, but also very loud and runs very hot. The 460 is not much of a drop in performance but does much better than the 470 for heat and noise. If you need more power down the road, add a second (just make sure you get a motherboard that supports this if you think you might want to do that at some point) and 2 460's beat a 480 by about 25% on average (see my previous post).
For storage the Samsung Spinpoint F3 seems to be the way to go (for speed, at least).
As far as CPU cooling -- I think this is a good idea. If you're investing thousands on a system spend 30 bucks and get a quality aftermarket cooler. If you ever want to overclock -- great! but even if you don't the 1366 chipset runs hot and it can only help the lifespan of the system to get one. The Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus seems to be the best for price/performance (at $30) but most any cooler should be better than the stock cooler. Here's a list comparing various coolers -- this is based around the 1156 chipset but most of these (the 212, specifically) will work for 1366 as well.
In case someone's not familiar with them:
1366 = i7 9xx family of processors
1156 = i5 7/8xx family
I hope I'm not overwhelming you with information but this is something I've been researching for a while for when I can afford a system.