$300 - $400 gaming PC without HDD, monitor, OS, etc

[wqerty]

I'm thinking about the possibility of a gaming rig of no more than $400 as a substitute for PS3 or Xbox 360, I know It's a small amount of money but I already have a hard drive, monitor, windows 7,optical drive, keyboard, mouse, speaker and all the accessories so all the $ can go into the meaty stuff.

The last time I built a rig was 8 years ago so I'm not exactly up-to-date with the current hardwares. I games I will most likely to play are some big titles from several years ago that I always wanted to try, like GTA4, Fallout new vegas, LA noire, NFS shift 2,Red Dead Redemption, Dirt 3, portal 2 etc as well as some new and upcoming ones. The games will be run at 1920x1080, medium quality is fine with me but of course higher is better. I'm in a smallish town so I'll buy all parts from amazon or newegg.

So that's $300-$400 for CPU, Memory, Graphic Card, Motherboard, Power supply and a case, I'm open to suggestions so anything goes. Thanks in advance!

 

[ScrewySqrl]

this is sorta bottom end, but it should be a decent medium to high gamer:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($85.99 @ NCIX US)
Motherboard: ASRock 880GM-LE FX Micro ATX AM3+ Motherboard ($54.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Pareema 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1333 Memory ($18.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 500GB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($49.99 @ NCIX US)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 650 1GB Video Card ($110.11 @ NCIX US)
Case: Rosewill R101-P-BK MicroATX Mid Tower Case ($29.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 430W 80 PLUS Certified ATX12V Power Supply ($24.99 @ Newegg)
Optical Drive: Lite-On iHAS124-04 DVD/CD Writer ($15.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Total: $391.04
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2012-09-21 07:05 EDT-0400)

the CPU is end-of-life, but decent, the motherboard can take bulldozer and piledriver, and teh 650 is a decent card at the low end, generally capable at 'high' rather than'ultra' settings

 

[Super Frag]

CPU:Intel Core i3-3220 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz 65w LGA 1155 Dual Core Processor
Motherboard:ASRock B75M-GL LGA 1155 Intel B75 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
Memory:CORSAIR XMS 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 Ultra Stable Desktop Memory Model CMX4GX3M2A1333C8
Power Supply:CORSAIR Builder Series CX430 V2 (CMPSU-430CXV2) 430W ATX12V v2.3 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply (20$ after Rebate and Promo Code)
Case:Rosewill R101-P-BK 120mm Fan MicroATX Mid Tower Computer Case
Video Card:MSI N560GTX Twin Frozr II/OC GeForce GTX 560 (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

Total:412$ after Shipping and Rebates

The i3 will thrash the Phenom in almost all the games and the GTX 560 is much better than the 650 for gaming at 1080p.