A PS4 equivalent rig for $500.00?

[blightedpersona]

If you want to make a powerful gaming rig on the cheap, you'll need to buy each part individually when it's on a good sale
Make slickdeals.net your homepage and take a peek at it once or twice a day until you have all the parts you need, or set up some email alerts on that site

A couple weeks ago I got a brand new Radeon HD 7950 for a measly $132 because of that site (180 - 10% coupon code -$30 mail in rebate)

You could probably snag a good 7200 3TB toshiba or barracuda hard drive for around $95, or a good 2TB at about $75 or 80. I've been watching hard drive deals a lot lately and unfortunately most of them have been external drives on sale which I'm hesitant to buy because even though it's technically the same thing just in a different enclosure, I assume hard drives are binned and the better ones are sold as internal drives
For processor, if you decide to raise your budget a bit, the i5-4670k has been on sale for $200 a couple times recently. Otherwise something like the amd fx-8320 has been on sale for $130, or try for something like a fx-4130 at about $85 or so
Radeon hd 7870s have been at the $110 price point multiple times so thats a solid choice of video card
Actually they may have even been $100 last month I'm not sure, either way $110 is the price to wait for if you decide on that card
Just a few hours ago, 8gb of Gskills ripjaw x ram was going for only $40, I think you just missed that deal but 8gb of good brand ram has frequently been in the $45 price range

I'm not too familiar with pricing for other parts, case, motherboard, power supply

You dont really need a dvd drive so that can save you $15 or so just going digital. Hell, if you're pc gaming I doubt youll be buying physical disks anyways

Just checked slickdeals and it looks like there's a thermaltake tr500 watt psu on sale for $20 after rebate atm, and let's assume I don't know, $35 for case, $80 for motherboard and that would total 20(PSU)+35(case)+80(mobo)+110(GPU)+45(RAM)+80(HDD)+90(CPU) = 460 if you went the cheap route on the processor, but again you'd have to wait for the good deals and buy part by part over the course of a month or two, and you gotta make sure you fill out all those mail in rebates properly