One of the benefits of PC gaming is that it scales to YOUR budget, not the other way around. Playing games on low/medium is akin to playing on a console, and you can achieve these results with £400 (or whatever the equivalent in yankeebux is). The more you spend, the better the results - but obviously spending less will mean you will have to upgrade more often down the line. £1000 (or equivalent) is enough to max out games nowadays, and this will last you past the upcoming generation of consoles too.

Probably ~1500$ [url=http://pcpartpicker.com/user/Blowdrum/saved/2dJ2]Here's my build[/url], which I actually put together a few days ago.

In my opinion, if you're going to build a gaming PC, make it worth your while and don't regret any purchases you make to build it. Make it count. That being said, I think $700-800 is reasonable for something that's going to last you a while, if you're really on a budget. $1000-1200 if you want to really invest on hardware that will keep you set for years to come. That means grab a newer CPU, a really nice video card and enough RAM to cover you. Obviously, if you can make some sacrifices that don't affect the actual build (ie not getting an extravagant case), do so. I just feel building a budget PC just generates more costs down the line than having something that covers you for a longer time.

For something that can play most games (not on ultra) will run you about 600$+.The initial buy in for PC is more expensive but the amount of money you save on games is unbelievable with Steam GoG and the Humble bundles.

About 500 if you live in the US. Mine was 700, but I live in Canada so stuff is more expensive

$1,500 of you want to play next-gen with enhanced visuals and performance on PC.

Here you go

Well, you want to future proof your PC for the next ~5 years and then manage to run everything at high settings? That's not really economical as to future proof requires the purchase of the most cutting edge hardware on the market, which happens to be extremely expensive. It might be cheaper to upgrade parts every 2 or so years. But if you want to last with the same build for 5 years, running next gen games at higher settings than even next gen consoles, then you're looking at maybe a $2000 PC. What ever GPU you purchase should have at least 3GB+ GDDR5 memory (maybe 6GB if you want to be guaranteed future proof - Radeon HD 7990 or Titan.. maybe those two are already overkill idk haha). And maybe you should go for AMD (as thats what consoles are using). Otherwise, a $700 PC Build could get you through nextgen if you're ok with medium-ish settings (PC hardware has simply eclipsed consoles in recent years, where in the past consoles were usually ahead of PC's for a good couple of months, the next gen consoles are already behind the best of PC's).