Most of those games aren't AAA.

I'd like to give a hypothetical to the more PC gamers.

I have always wanted a gaming PC, but honestly the PCs I have owned (and do own) tend to be pretty poor and anything released in past five years struggle on my current one (Guild Wars 2 was hilariously bad on it). I went to my friend's place this past Summer to see Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim with all these texture mods and my jaw dropped at how much better it looked.

Let us say I have a budget of $2,000 at some point in the year 2013. This would be for the following items.

1. A desktop computer (So, the processor, the motherboard, the video card, etc.)
2. A monitor
3. Mouse and Keyboard and likely some sort of gamepad
4. All assorted cables

Is this reasonable to play a recent game like Skyrim WITH all those fancy mods? If not, what would I be looking at? $3,000? $4,000?

Thank you for any help, my main hurdle to PC gaming has been not being familiar with building on. Go easy on me, I admit my ignorance on this aspect of gaming.

Well,

A couple of 2012 PC only games that would definitely qualify as AAA (as in budget), would be DIABLO 3 and GUILD WARS 2.

Just an example.

But perhaps you and the other guy can name some others.

(I quoted you because I have posts set to 100 post per page, and I didn't want to find his on the last page)

@ Augen: Yeah, easily. If you want any suggestions on monitors, keyboards, and mice, let us know! =) $2,000 is wayyyyyyyy more than enough for all of that. You could probably get away with a $1,500 budget even (although depending on the monitor, it'll probably be higher).

Also, don't forget the external speakers! Unlesss of course you already have a great speaker setup.

I need to know how to go about building one, what to look for, relative costs, etc.

For monitor I'd like a flat screen one to help with clutter, and a 16:9 aspect ratio roughly 19-24" size.

No clue on keyboards...open there. On a mouse I want on that is responsive and has scroll, and side click buttons.

Hard drive I figure need at least 500 giga bytes, but look at a tera byte to be safe.

Processor? Ram? I do not know, enough to play new games for next few years on high settings. Like I said, I don't want to have to worry about it looking like a PS2 game slide show as it is on my current one.  

I have traditionally been 5-7 years behind the curve on PC (I just started Civ 4 last year...someday Civ 5) so if I do this want to do it right.

You could build one for half that.
Skyrim is a consolised game running on an ancient modified game engine (Gamebryo) that could run on a Geforce 3 Ti (See: Oldblivion).

It's only a dual-threaded game (Like Oblivion), so a decently clocked Ivy Bridge Dual-Core is more than enough, pair it with 8gb of Ram which is cheap and a decent video card or two and you're set for playing Skyrim with all the pretties turned on.
You should also go back and try out Oblivion heavily modded, after all these years of mod releases it looks incredible, putting anything on consoles (And even Skyrim!) to shame. :P

For example Oblivion:

I'll leave these with you then. :P

OGEv3 and threw on Godrays, SSAO, Fake HDR, DoF etc'.
High quality distant lands, AEVWD, Water shaders, Improved Trees and Flora 2, Qarl's texture pack. lots of Anisotropic filtering, config tweaks and the 2gb work around, high polygon trees and grass, wrote my own water shader.
Got a few more mods, but they shouldn't do much to the image quality.

Thing with modding Oblivion is you can spend days/hours modding and tweaking it and have a complete blast doing it. :P

Heck, if you want to go in the opposite direction and run Oblivion on a Geforce 3 Ti... You can do that too with Oldblivion. :)

Nope. Oblivion Mod Manager.

I will also bother folks about these mods when the time comes. They make a world of difference.