Building/Saving up for a Gaming PC...any reccomendations/advice?

The title pretty much summarises what this thread is going to be about. As of today I've decided to start saving up for a gaming PC (put £150 towards it thus far) as my current one is really outdated quite frankly.

It was fine just for general use (Twitter,YouTube all that good stuff) for several years, especially once Windows 7 was installed onto it. Despite being an older machine it actually ran FASTER with Windows 7 on it than Windows XP, but recently it's become quite a chore to use even for that, with me frequently choosing to use my smartphone for those tasks even when I'm right by my computer, and since I want to try and get into PC Gaming and play a bunch of games only available on PC...well, thought. I may as well kill two birds with one stone.

As I said before I have £150 towards it already, but I have no idea what parts to look into that are the best value for money, ensure it's future proof, if I should just look into a prebuilt tower etc, so that's why I've posted this thread.

Any input that anypony can provide would be much appreciated. ^^

Yeah, try and build yourself, could get a decent gaming pc for around £300-400 (not sure about prices atm). Reusing parts from your old pc such as hdd, monitor, case etc. will save a bit of money.

Go look up some guides on pc building if you haven't already, should be plenty around including help with choosing parts.

What games are you planning on playing as well? There's a big difference between, say, Amnesia, which can run on low settings with integrated graphics and Battlefield that needs a graphics card

Yeah, I've been told that many a time that building it yourself is cheaper in the long run whenever I've proposed or merely casually talked about gaming PC's over the years.

I'll be sure to keep that in mind, will no doubt need to call on somepony's assistance on more than one occasion. ^^;

Not sure if anything besides the hard drive and POSSIBLY the case will be worth keeping to be honest, it's all so outdated that if I kept more of it it'd be the equalivant of replacing the brush on a broom when you may as well buy a whole new broom, if you take my meaning. Really hope that analogy gets my point across. ^^;

It may well become my primary means of playing games that aren't console exclusive if I like playing games on it enough so it'll need to be able to handle your average modern game at a fairly high spec to be worth my while not just using my consoles still, for all the effor and cost this is going to take for a novice such as myself.

You'd save yourself about £50 keeping the hard drive, the problem with the case though is shop-bought PC's often have motherboards created for the case, so to speak. What's the actual name of your computer? If you want I can see if there's anything salvageable

If there's anything salvageable, I could try to put a parts list together if you like?

Honestly...I have NO IDEA what the name of my PC is. ^^; I would check or take a picture of it here or see how I can check etc, but I'm at my nan's at the moment and I'm going home tomorrow so I won't be able to do either until then.

Keep the harddrive, if it totally fails
HEY! EXTRA HDD.

I was planning to keep the hard drive anyway, and upgrade it when it fills up. I plan to wipe it clean when I get the new machine (backed up what I want to keep) so that'll take at least a bit longer.

There are a few magazines floating around the market about computer customization; I'll see what I can find to jog ideas.
(Also having plans for making a gaming PC, though starting from the ground up, and in no particular rush)

I have been building my own PCs for many years and self builds are the way to go. As long as you follow basic safety rules it's simple enough. I can recommend buying Custom PC magazine as it often has various guides to help like a recent one for building a Skyrim gaming PC for £350. It also has a section offering component recommendations and example system lists at various prices.
A couple of tips I can give- NEVER buy a generic (unbranded) power supply or use one that comes with a cheap case. Yes, you may be lucky and have no problems but say you need 500W, then a cheapie will likely only be able to do this output for a short time and certain conditions. I have seen cheap ones literally explode!! If this happens it may kill other components
Also try and get the best combination of processor and graphics card you can. I know it sounds obvious, but the cheapest Intel LGA1155 CPU and cheap motherboard may not be your best bet just to (maybe) upgrade at a later date. I'm running an AMD Phenom quad core as I couldn't afford an i5 2500K. If I'd paid the same price for a cheap Pentium and LGA1155 board then the CPU would probably be a gaming bottleneck and my PC would also be slow at non-gaming tasks. Don't worry about upgrades, things change so fast just use it for 3 years or so then build a new one! By the time it struggles then there will be a whole new generation out.
You shouldn't need a more expensive graphics card than a GTX560Ti either unless you are running multiple monitors or have a mahoosive monitor with a resolution higher than 1920x1080. There are new generation cards out now but there's no point really spending more to get 80 frames per second when 50 on a 560Ti is enough. The graphics card is also one of the easiest critical components to upgrade anyway.

Well only go Intel if you can afford Ivy Bridge or even a standard i5 2500K. An AM3 Phenom X4 is good enough although not as fast for a lot less money though, I was just saying don't go the cheap Intel route as an LGA1155 Pentium is quite **** for the money. And don't even think of wasting money on LGA2011 or Bulldozer! If you want to splurge some cash, get a mid-range Intel set up then spend the extra on an SSD instead

I'd check out DinoPC.com.
You can build a machine from scratch there, and they'll build it and send the complete machine to you.
Brilliant if you're less confident about building machines, like myself.
Prices aren't bad either: Built my desktop w/ AMD 3.00ghz Quad Core APU and 16GB Ram for ~£540 including postage.

Thanks for all of the advice thus far everypony. ^^ Will no doubt be refering to it once I have the money saved up and I'm ready to get the parts ordered to get it built, built for me etc, whichever I decide to do.

Also if you want to buy the components and build it yourself I can recommend www.scan.co.uk I get all my stuff from them and never had any problems whatsoever.

Well, i would tell you to build your own one of course, as you can save up to £300 when compared with buying a store bought pc. Also, if your'e on a budget, then you may want to look into purchasing an AMD APU. This is basically a processor, and a graphics card smooshed together, so what you essentially end up with, is integrated graphics that can play dirt 3 at 1080p with 45FPS. Whats more, is that you can combine this with an AMD 6670, and have the power of two graphics cards running at once! Also, it's really not that expensive, for the processor, graphics and motherboard, the total price i found on novatech ( a computer retailer) was £218.

I can agree, my current machine has an AMD A8-3870 APU. All games I have run very nicely on max settings on what is essentially onboard.

Yeah, they are amazing value for money, which is why I'll probably be saving up for one too, cos i need a new desktop