Just remember that the steam survey showed that the large majority of pc gamers' pcs do not match xbox1 or ps4 power.

What do you mean, exactly? Large majority of those PCs are ancient or laptops at this point which have issues with the latest&greatest games.

The OP wants a system that runs new games great for as cheaply as possible.

I don't know if anyone has already mentioned this, but don't cheap out on the motherboard. You're better off paying an additional $50 with up to four slots for RAM and more PCI e slots. You might want to upgrade RAM and you might want to add a capture card in the future. Having a cheap motherboard you're really just limiting yourself and not giving yourself any room to upgrade.

Also, with Windows 7, that's another $90, so with a decent montherboard you'll looking looking at $700.  It's more powerful than the PS4, but it will probably run the games just as good as the PS4.  So what's the point in paying almost double for multiconsole games that are going to play the same.

If you build a PC that weak you might as well use it for exclusive games unless you're not interested in getting consoless at all.

the point being that matching the ps4/xb1 specs is pretty much a waste of time and money.

You can run games great without that amount of RAM and with a worse vid card. THAT would be as cheaply as possible. Trying to stay on par with such useless arbitrary stats as matching the amount of RAM is an excercise in futility, given that xb1 and ps4 specifically are designed with said amount in order for games to be developed without load times. Because pc games are not programmed in such a way, the additional ram is useless......

I would only recommend him getting a better mobo if his friend definately wants some enthusiast level graphics way above PS4.

His motherboard is fine, it's a budget build so getting a second PCI-E slot should not be in the priority list, It's just not necessary if you're satistied in single GPU setup comparable to consoles so one 7870 is enough. This is likely going to a casual player too, so better to keep it simple.

Also if he gets an old CPU socket mobo, it's better to get a cheap one now and then some later date either sell the PC and build a new one or just buy an upgrade kit mobo/CPU/GPU.

I don't find it being a waste at all, if you build a good setup now it will last you (atleast as far as multiplatform titles are concerned) until next-gen ends. The OP wants best bang for the buck, not just acceptable performance and he set the consoles performance level as the goal.

You definately want to go for 8gb of ram and 7870. Some games are finally starting to use more ram so it will be advantageous atleast for texture quality to just go with 8gb, ram is cheap anyways, would expect consoles to have an effect on it too.

7870, imo is one of the best price/performance GPU on the market atm. Going up or down from there ur gonna get worse performance for more or more performance for too much.

Sure about that?

For one, 34.10% of video cards aren't even listed on Steam statistics.
Secondly, if a notebook uses optimus and Steam gathers the data, it will pick up the Intel GPU and not the nVidia one.
So the statistics are already skewed. :)

Thirdly, the next generation consoles will force many people to finally upgrade, even "free" graphics chips can run current console games perfectly fine with a 720P resolution @ 30fps or more.
Whenever a popular albeit demanding game is released, video card sales climb, aka. The "Crysis effect".

Heck, even today's crappy low-end Haswell Dual-Cores are faster than the 8-core Jaguar processors, that's not accounting for the fact that games won't even be able to use all 8 cores on the consoles anyway as 1-2 are reserved for the OS.

The current consoles have simply made the need to upgrade non-existent for many PC gamers, see what happens when the next generation of consoles  launches, but as it stands today, a 6-7 year old PC is perfectly capable of playing pretty much all the multi-platforms at 720@30fps, provided they have at-least a modern $40 GPU.

Yeah and it's pretty obvious that it's true.

First of all, the specs in the pc config are just barely equal, and don't include several other costs:
No bluray, no os, no input devices.

The ps4 and 1 are pretty expensive to equal in parts cost, and on top of that, everyone knows that console hardware is optimized to run faster than their pc counterparts, and the games are optimized to the hardware.

It's very much doubtful that a 6-7 year old 500-600$ pc could run the psone multiplats. Maybe a 1k$ computer from 6 years ago.
I built my pc about 8 years ago for 1400, and have kept the videocard somewhat up to date (200$ every 4 years). I have trouble running most new releases. PC gamers say the same thing every generation and it's never true.

Not to mention that this gpu exceeds the power capability on that psu, and still uses more power that the xb1 or ps4.

And that mobo is pretty crappy, and would probably limit the ram...(oh and no warranty included either)

You bought overexpensive pc 8 years ago and expect it to run great today? was it ready built or did you build it yourself? Just upgrading ur GPU isn't going to cut it at that point, especially now that developers have to learn splitting tasks on more weaker cores (thanks to consoles), there finally is a reason to own 4-8 core cpu.

I run a 500w PSU with setup that uses more power than his, his PSU should be fine as long as he isnt trying to heavily overclock it. There are some pages that u can use to calculate some estimates based on what ur going to connect onto your computer.

Why exactly do you think that mobo is crappy and will limit the ram, it actually supports 32gb of ram and it says it has 3 years warranty...MSI has been around for a long time, they know their stuff.

Optimization doesnt only exist on consoles, btw. You have to optimize your game for as big of a PC audience as possible otherwise ur doing the same thing Crytek did with Crysis 1. Too powerful stuff for too weak PCs = not selling to maximum potential.

A Core 2 Quad Q6600 was released 6 years ago. Has a higher IPC than the Phenom 2 or AMD FX, most hit 3.6ghz fine, that's more than enough CPU grunt for most games today, heck that 6 year old CPU once overclocked is faster than the un-released next generation console processors.
I have acess to one, with a $40 Radeon 6570 in it, want me to run some benchmarks of newer games at 720P?

Blu-ray is only $20 if you shop around, but who uses Optical Discs on the PC anymore anyway?
Keyboard and Mouse combo's you can pick up for $10 or less.
There are free Operating System's such as Linux, which can run allot of Windows Games via Steam with the rest Wine.