I'm thinking about building or buying a gaming PC. I'm attracted to the smaller indie games on PC, the powerful hardware, and the customization. Frankly, a PC seems like a better choice for me than a PS4 or Nextbox. 

I'm quite intimidated by PC gaming honestly. I don't really know where to start. What to buy, how to update this, etc. 

Can I get some advice on building/buying a decent rig, and getting a setup that will work for me?

I bought my PC through iBuyPower. You can tell them exactly what parts you want, and they'll buy them and put it together for you. My friends and I have used this company for years.

Or you can be "cool" and build it yourself. Or a "total nerd" and buy a pre-built one. :P

What's your budget?

Anyways, because I want to do this:
Games I recommend without knowing your tastes:

1) The Witcher 1 + 2
2) Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (or Battlefield 3)
3) Skyrim
4) Terraria
5) Minecraft
6) League of Legends
7) Dota 2 (similar to League of Legends but 10x cooler yo)
8) Spiral Knights (It's an online multiplayer game. You can go solo or team up with up to 3 others and run through randomly made dungeons. Very similar in gameplay to 2D Zelda games)
9) Team Fortress 2
10) Defense Grid: The Awakening (very awesome Tower Defense game - and I hate tower defense games)
11) Tribes: Ascend
12) Bastion

Thanks, I will definately check that site out. I don't really want to build it myself, I guess I'm not "cool" :).

Thank you also for the list, I knew about most of them, but not all. The witcher is good?

I'm pretty flexible on the budget. I want a rig that will last me a while, I know that's difficult given the rapid advancement of PC tech, but something that will be able to run everything for 3 years or so would be nice. How much is that going to run me?

If you have a big budget, buy an Alienware.  If you don't have much, do you have a friend who can put a computer together for you?  It's pretty much like lego.

I stick with AMD right now because its cheaper and generally performs as well as any Intel.  Avoid some 8 core's...there's some timing issues right now.

8-16gigs of DDR3.   And....spend...the...damn....money...on...a...GOOD...solid...state...boot....drive.  CANNOT state that any more severely.  Solid state hard drives for your boot/game drive is a minimum now.  Don't do even 10,000 rpm Sata over it.  You wouldn't believe how frigging fast solid state is.

As for graphics, you can pay 800 for bleeding edge or pay around 180 for something generally 20 percent slower.  I run dual 180 dollarish video cards combined and they rock every single game.  Don't spend 800 on a video card.

Lastly, get liquid cooling for your processor.  They work SO well and don't break down like regular fans do.  Kick it off with at least 700W in power supply and a decent case...I use Cooler Master for liquid cooling, case and power supply whenever i build a computer for someone.  They're great, not crazy expensive and awesome quality.

I just checked my email, and around 2 years ago I bought a PC with these specs:

And everything else (case, cooling, etc). It cost me $1,073 after tax.

I would, however, recommend getting the "GTX 560 TI" if you're going to get a similar setup. If you want to see (on a fairly accurate scale) how good different CPUs and GPUs are, check out benchmarks at this site. =)

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/

Flip the tab to CPU to check out those ones. Look at the "High End" ones for each. As you can see, my gfx card is fairly high, but my CPU is much better by comparison. It's mostly because the PC games I play require a lot more on the CPU. I'll probably upgrade my GPU sometime within the next year or so, but I honestly don't need to. I run BF3 on high settings and max any game with less reqs.

I may not be able to max the new games coming out in the next few years, but they will continue to look beautiful on my setup! That's one thing I never understood about console gamers when they trash talk PC. They act like we have to upgrade every other year because we HAVE to max the games, but we don't. I could keep this same exact PC setup and probably easily play new PC games for 7-8 years to come.

EDIT: Keep in mind that buying your first PC will cost a lot more than future upgrades since you'll most likely only be buying one or two parts to upgrade years from now. Unless you want to rebuy everything from scratch, of course. 

EDIT 2: I'll disagree with psyberius on a few points. I hate liquid cooling and I've never had an issue with regular cooling going bad. My friends have always told me to never get liquid cooling. You'll get opinions on both sides, so it's up to you. 

Also, I wouldn't get an SSD if you're on a budget. While starting up in a heartbeat is really fun, it's really not necessary and you can probably spare the extra seconds it takes for your HDD to boot things up rather than waste the large increase in cash that SSD's cost. Then again, if you have the cash and you really want an SSD, go for it. =)

Total disagreement.   SSD is something you shouldn't miss.  The cost has dropped hugely, the sizes and performance have increased and just booting on an SSD is heavenly let alone running highly intense PC games off.    It's not much more money to get a good Sata-3 SSD over getting a regular 7200 RPM hard drive.  The only thing in do miss in SSD is size...there's no such thing as a 1TB or 2TB SSD in your future.  This means if you plan on storing tons of Divx, mp3 etc, you are going to need a supplimentary old school hard drive 1-2tb in size.  SSD also does not have any moving parts.  MTBF-Mean Time Between Failure on them is up in the 10's of thousand of hours....basically forever or until you want to upgrade.   MTBF on regular mechanical hard drives are way lower, and added to how much slower they are, they just don't make good boot/gaming drives anymore.

PC gaming is hand in hand with SSD now.  I would even think about gaming without SSD.

As for liquid cooling, its quiet, it cools more effectively and it generally doesn't get gummed up like a regular CPU fan does.  Gaming jacks the heat of your CPU up significantly which makes some old school fans sound like aircraft taking off.  Liquid Cooling doesn't do that.

Look, I've built well over 100 gaming PCs(and god only knows how many businesss/school type).  It's an excellent 2nd job. :)  I'd put my advice up against anybodies. :)

From a quick check, it still looks like SSD's cost around 3 times more than HDDs. Like I said in my original post, if he has the cash and wants the extra quickness, then go for it. If he's on a budget, it's the last thing he should upgrade imo. "PC gaming is hand in hand with SSD now" is a bit of a silly statement. But I understand you think very highly of your own opinion.

As far as liquid cooling goes, like I said, you'll hear arguments from both sides and it really just comes down to personal preference. Like I said, from personal experience, I've never had issues with regular fan cooling and I've found it to be reliable and easy to take care of. My room definitely doesn't sound like an airplane is taking off. :P I never notice the slight noise it makes - music and game sound eeeasily drowns it out. It's not very loud at all.

I definitely recommend 16 gigs of DDR3 memory. I couldn't be happier with it and it's pretty dirt cheap these days.

If your only interested in the smaller indie games you don't really need a powerhouse PC.

Why a GTX 570? A GTX 660 Ti performs better, uses less power and is cheaper.