Good gaming PC build for under $500 dollars?

Depends on if you are looking for an upgrade, or a complete system.
Its doable, but why go mid-teir, when you can go higher re-using old parts ya know?

Very hard to make a build since price varies from country to country...

http://www.f13pc.com/loja/index.php?catid=2&id=14

Look at the ones under 500€, this is from Portugal, so it's Portuguese. It's where i built my computer based of one of those builds, mine's the 1170€ computer, with changes boosting the price up to 1.4k or so. I would say the 470€ suits you... but if you could manage the 570€ one, the gpu is really important if you don't want to upgrade in the next 2 years.

The 470€ build should last 2 years if lucky, the 570€ build would be better and later on you could buy more ram or something alike, also the SSD is not important, changing it for a 250GB HDD and put the money somewhere else would do better.

Of course, this is the price for my country, i'm pretty sure you americans pay alot less for computer parts so go do your research and make a build based of something.

what price you are talking in ?
In my country it always at USA based price times 1.5.
500 USD can be quite complicated. I got my laptop that can run many games, high setting on DmC only around at 600 USD.

I bought an HP Pavilion p7-1245 at Best Buy in the US for $500 and played Tomb Raider and Bioshock Infinite on it. I didn't get to max out any settings because of the built-in graphics, but the built-in is still pretty good Radeon HD 6530D chip. I eventually put in a GeForce 660 card for about another $250 to boost performance, but I was able to run newer games with what I had just fine. The PC also has 8 GB RAM, quad-core processor, 1 TB hard drive. When I run the Windows Experience thing in Control Panel the only ding my system takes is in hard drive speed (5.9/7.9), but I never really felt that was a problem.

check new egg for the bundles deals. they have some combos with motherboard memory cpu video card and psu. you can get a gtx 650-660 for 80-150. i just got a 650 to use as a physx card for 98 and it has rebate that i havent even attempted yet.
however you could go with a AMD APU that can do video also and then pair it with a a 6670 and they work together to do video. ive seen people playing bf3 on that kind of setup before with low-medium settings and good fps

Here is a pretty awesome list of builds for newbies.

clicky

30fps looks frankly shocking though :/