building your own is not typically about it costing less, but getting better value for your money, and something that is a staple in PC gaming culture. For any given price point, you can simply build something better for the same price... but building something cheaper typically means that you are going to give something up... and what you give up depends on what exactly you are wanting to do!
If you are looking for a budget friendly high end build then build to the following specs:
$140, Win7 or 8 pro OEM
$85, H series chipset motherboard made by MSI, ECS, or ASUS with 4 ram slots. 1155 boards can be found cheap now that it is being phased out while still having lots of great features, just be sure to get a proper CPU that will fit it. (note: no overclocking can be done with these chipsets!)
$140-190 Simple i5 CPU. Get one that matches your motherboard (LGA 1155 or 1150), and get one without the K, P, or S tacked onto the name. K chips are for overclocking (something this is not built for), while S chips are low power, and P chips have no onboard video. If you have a Microcenter, they have dirt cheap prices on CPUs, and sometimes you can get a good deal on a nicer motherbaord bundled with it.
$70, 8GB of DDR3 1600 memory. I typically use Corsair for my own builds, but honestly I have used Mushkin, Kingston, OCZ, Crucial, and G.Skill and all work fine at stock speeds, and again this is not a system for overclocking, so just about anything will do.
$50, 5-600W 80+ Bronze or better power supply. Seasonic is an easy choice for cheap but decent (especially when on sale... which is almost always), but other brands may have more specific features that you might want. Just don't buy Rosewell.
$100, 2TB HDD. Seagate makes great, quiet, cheap, 7200rpm drives that perform well and are fairly reliable, but their high end offerings are not as amazing. WD makes great high end drives (Black, Blue, and SE drives are particularly decent), but their cheaper Green, Red, and AV models tend to have QC issues.
$40 or less. Get a good quality but dirt cheap case. Non negotiables are that it have a bottom mount power supply, have 140mm fan options, be black, and have rounded or machined edges (so that you do not cut yourself). DO NOT USE POWER SUPPLIES BUNDLED WITH CASES! Outside of that, just get something that looks decent enough to hide beside a desk or behind a monitor that will get the job done. Down the road you can always move up to a much nicer and quieter $150-200 case, but for starting out your money is best spend elsewhere.
$20, CD/DVD burner. Any cheap one will do, and you may have an old one you can use without having to buy one.
Before shopping around for specials and sales you are talking at worst ~$705, but more likely somewhere around $630 before purchasing the main event which is the GPU. Now I am a HUGE fan of nVidia, but you know what? You should go with AMD for the GPU. AMD does have issues with some crossfire configurations, and they are not always the best or fastest... but they are cheap, and most of their cards come with a bunch of free AAA games, and if all you are doing is gaming then this is the way to go! Something in the $180-250 range should play BF or Skyrim just fine, but this system can handle even high end GPUs with minimal bottlenecking, so spend as much as you can afford on a good GPU that will last you a little while.
A few notes:
1) Microcenter has dirt cheap CPU prices (i5 4570 for $160 vs newegg at $200), and when they have sales on other hardware then their prices are hard to beat... but their normal prices on most items are not so great.
2) Dont bother with overclocking. First, you need a proper education to do it without breaking something. Second, you need a $30 more expensive processor, plus a $30 aftermarket CPU cooler, plus a $40 more expensive motherboard, all for the expense of using more power, putting out more heat, and only gaining a few extra frames per second that you would never notice in the first place. Another way to think of it is what will make more of a difference in a game? Spending $100 on your CPU? or spending $100 more on your GPU? The answer is going to be the GPU almost every time!
3) Check NCIX. They are a Canadian company that now sells in the states, and their prices are awesome! Only problem though is that their service is dog slow. I had to RMA a HDD a while back and the whole process took over 2 months... which is beyond ridiculous for a drive that was completely and totally dead (click of death). However, I have thrown a lot of business their way, and only had 1 issue, so they are not half bad, and the prices they have are hard to turn down.
4) Next gen consoles are coming out. The build I outlined is going to be great for just about any current gen games on the market, especially if paired with a good $3-400 GPU. But the fact of the moment is that next gen consoles, and thus next gen games, are right around the corner. These next gen games are going to be HUGE! Large worlds, lots of clutter, more atmostpheric and post processing effects, and insane texture quality. What we know for sure is that this will make for a large demand of Ram and vRam. I suggest getting 8GB of system memory, and be ready to expand that to 16GB. On the GPU front we already see games like skyrim peg GPUs with 1.2GB of memory stock, and 2GB of memory when heavily modded. So I am going to suggest looking for a GPU with a minimum of 2GB of ram, and preferably more than that if you want to be sure that you have enough.
The real questions that are unanswered is what this means for CPUs. We know that this means that games will finally start taking advantage of more than 4 CPU cores, but what we do not know is if they will need more cores, if they will take advantage of hyper threading, or if AMD CPUs will have any advantages as both the PS4 and X1 will be running on AMD processors. I guess what I am saying is that for current gen gaming, the above rig will rock, but nobody really knows what 2014 will bring.
5) Upgrade to a SSD for your system drive ASAP. It will not add a single fps to your gaming experience, but it will simply make your system feel fast by having insanely fast load times. Skyrim on my old HDDs took 30-60 seconds to load some areas, and when I moved to SSDs that dropped to load times of 3-10 seconds. Same system, that was merely replacing the HDDs with SSDs. It really makes those transitions and loading times much less painful. Unfortunately games eat lots of space, so you should get a 480-512GB SSD for your system, and while the price keeps falling, they are still not exactly cheap yet. But 2nd to getting a high end GPU, this is probably the most important thing you can get for your system.
6) If you need to cut more from the budget you can game just fine with a much slower CPU. And AMD A10 APU, or an Intel i3 will get you through in a pinch, but they will choke in high action points, and they will bottleneck mid to high end GPUs. The i5 really is the best thing to get if you can at all afford it.
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