So I've been saving up for awhile now, with the money I get on christmas and my birthday (in feb) I should have around £250 to £350. I was originally planning to buy a new PC, so I could play games like CIV5 and Tropico 4 on high settings whilst running smoothly (£250 will be enough as my mum or brother will pay for the moniter, keyboard and anything like warranties or security etc). But now I've been increasingly interested in the Vita, it'll cost £230 (wi-fi only) and I could spend an extra £70 or so on one of the horribly overpriced proprietary Vita memory cards. I will probably have more than enough at launch.

I'm not a huge PC gamer, I play maybe 25% of my games on PC (although a better PC could increase that). I haven't owned a handheld since the gameboy colour and I'm a huge fan of sony franchises like Uncharted, Resistance, LBP etc. that'll all be coming to Vita.

So what do you guys think, should I buy a good gaming rig or the Vita? And why?

Thanks. :)

Update: This is the PC I can get for £300 (mostly build myself). 

Intel Core i3 2120 3.3GHz, 4GB RAM, GTS 450 1GB, 320GB HDD, DVD±RW, Windows 7 Home Premium 64

It'll run Tropico 4 at high-settings easily and CIV5 at high settings nicely.
I'm expecting it to run the next CIV/Tropico at medium to high settings depending on how large the graphical upgrade is.

I won't be upgrading until I really need too.

Update: I'm almost certainly getting the Vita, the hardware and the lineup look incredible, I don't play enough PC games to justify spending £300 on one, and my gaming relationship is getting stale, I need a new system to spice things up :P

Do you build your PCs or do you buy them prebuilt?

If the former, spend your money on PC parts.

If the latter, learn how to build a PC, then spend your money on PC parts. You'd be surprised at how much prebuilders rip people off.

Get a PC.

I'm expecting the Vita to go the way of the 3DS and drop in price real quick. Then when it's nice and cheap with cheaper game pick it up

I don't know how good a PC for 300€ in your country is but in mine you can't even run windows on such a cheap PC, at least not a newer version of it (7, Vista) if you buy unused, instead there are always people trying to get rid of computers and I think with a little reading you will be able to construct one yourself out of old ones that will do just fine for your needs, and it doesn't cost anything^^

Sadly you can't build a Vita easily and it won't come cheap for a little while (until the first used ones are available) so I would just keep the money to buy a Vita when it releases...

How good are you wanting your computer? £350 won't buy you much if you're looking to build something high-end.

I'll build it.

I dunno, I feel like I may not use it enough to justify the purchase, all I play on PC is are strategy games and the odd Valve game, but then again having a better system could make me want to buy games for that instead of my PS3.

But the Vita is looking really cool, and I could be missing out on more games I want if I don't get that as the vast majority of PC games I want are on PS3 and with PS4 around the corner, graphics gap won't be so big soon. (PS4 will certainly produce better graphics than a £300 PC I build now).

My personal recommendation would be to buy the Vita, and save up a lot more money for the PC. If there's only a handful of games you want to play on PC, the wait shouldn't kill you.

Intel Core i3 2120 3.3GHz, 3GB RAM, GTS 450 1GB, 320GB HDD, DVD±RW, Windows 7 Home Premium 64. I can get that for £300-£350. Maybe even a little less in 4 months. 

Don't you do any other things on your PC?

This is what you have to bear in mind. For most people, a console is just a console, no matter how much its makers try to market it as something more.

The PC is the most useful tool you have. By spending your money on that, you;ll get far more benefits than better game performance.

Also bear in mind that you can upgrade a PC incrementally. If you invest a fair amount of cash in it now, you'll only have to spend a couple of hundred of whatever currency you use to buy new parts every three years or so. You can keep the monitor, case, power supply, disk drive and a whole load of other stuff for a good ten years if you buy good quality; you only need to regularly upgrade the HDD/SSD, RAM and GPU every few years and the CPU every four or five.

If that's good enough to play the games you want to play, then buy it. I'm used to people spending £800-£900 on components for gaming PCs. Hell, one of my mates spent over £250 on a graphics card alone, a couple months back.