I've been a console gamer since the early 80's when I was just a little kid, so I don't know ANYTHING about PC gaming. I have a Steam account, with a few indie titles and free games, but that's all I can play because it's running on a store bought laptop that's a few years old.

I am really interested in going PC this generation, but only have about $500.00 to spend on a rig. I wanna know if it's possible to build something that can game at a stable 1080p/60fps...and that can run AAA titles at least CLOSE to PS4 quality. 

Does anybody think it can be done?

If you can get your fingers on some used parts (the casing and stuff like that) you should be able to make a PC that comes close to the PS4 in power, but you will never get that much graphical prowess out of the hardware than a PS4 does.

It can probably be done, but it will be crap...

A console with the same specs will always destroy a PC with the same specs.

If you're already paying more than 400$, go for a more powerful PC

Not really. Matching the performance of launch games shouldn't cost too much over $400, but you're going to need to upgrade it very often to stay on pace with the PS4.

Of course it could be done shopping around enough.
But what is the point? You'd have a PC that is simply $100 more expensive. In the end, you'd probably just be unhappy that you can't run any PC games that look better than their counterparts on the PS4..

Impossible for now.

To match the PS4 power, which is an optimized console, you would need an even better configuration.

And has of now the same graphic card or SLI graphic cards with up to 8 GDDR5 memory would cost way way more than 500$

I even wonder if a domestic gamer PC, with a super powerful SLI configuration, with games set on Ultra, best AA, mods and Downsampled from higher resolution can achieve what Killzone is doing as of now.

not only performance....

don't forget the console's small form factor at power consumption

my PC being a i7-2600K 4.3GHz ; GTX 650 Ti OC 2Gb and 8Gb RAM at 1666 costed me around 500 and its miles beyond next gen consoles

150$ for each CPU, GPU then some decent RAM and the rest should be around 500. you should be able to play CoD better than PS4 does :P