I have grown a recent affinity for PC gaming, having realised that the initially higher price for the machine is well compensated by cheaper games with more content. New releases, such as Borderlands 2, are often ￡10-￡15 GBP cheaper on Steam than on Xbox 360 and Steam has some truly fantastic sales on. From personal experience, I have also found the PC community to be generally much nicer and, unlike Xbox 360 where a game of Call of Duty results in me listening to a small child use bluer language than a sailor because I happened to kill them, I can just enjoy playing the game at my own ability/pace. Then there is great innovative titles, such as Minecraft, that take years to arrive on consoles (if ever) and lack the great mod support. My friends are, for the majority, all PC gamers also and it would be awesome to play with them! The consoles are also all getting extremely dated on the technological side and it looks as though the next generation, which has already begun with the likes of the Nintendo Wii U, won't offer a significant improvement. Since I already use my laptop for the majority of my media consumption, I like the idea of bringing gaming into the mix as well and thus eliminating the need for multiple devices that each take up space. I think now is the perfect time to begin raising some money and planning out a gaming PC.

I want to be able to comfortable play all the latest titles on reasonable settings at a solid frame-rate. Other things I would love to be able to do is host/play at the same time on a Tekkit server with a few people and also run screen-recording software, which will finally allow me to consider starting the YouTube channel I have been planning, without games running to a crawl. Video-rendering speeds aren't too important, so long as they aren't abysmally slow (which they wouldn't be as any modern processor will far outperform my current one). Unfortunately, my laptop meets none of these requirements. Its specification is as follows:

Acer Aspire 5552
AMD Athlon II P320 Dual-Core 2.1 Ghz
4 GB DDR3 RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 256 MB VRAM
1366x768 LCD Display

I don't have thousands, unfortunately to spend, and ￡600 GBP (including VAT and any shipping costs) is the maximum that I could possibly ever afford. The cheaper I can get this experience, the better! Since I would like to use this on my 42" Panasonic Plasma TV utilising Steam's Big Picture mode, I won't need to purchase a monitor. Though I will need a good wireless keyboard and mouse to adequately play games, so please do leave some suggestions for that. I will, naturally, need a copy of Windows 8 Professional 64-bit and it is important for that to be factored into the costs. However, I mainly need advice regarding what parts to buy and where to get them cheapest. Whilst I know quite a lot on the software side, such as how to use complex software like Photoshop or even do basic HTML coding for a website, my knowledge on which processors/graphics cards are better than each other isn't very good. Any help you can offer is greatly appreciated. Thanks!