There was a time where you could probably save 40-50% off the cost of a PC by building it yourself. And it would probably be faster and better. These days with the cost of PCs being so cheap it no longer makes sense. It's still possible but you'd have to scour the net for Black Friday / Cyber Monday deals to find good prices on all your components if you have any desire to save money. I would buy a pre-built PC that you can upgrade and build it up from there. That said, I'd still recommend building a PC from scratch to learn about all the parts and how it works but not to save money.

Ah gobears speaks of the good ole days. Nowadays I think it's cheaper to order from pre-built and then upgrade at a later date. It's always a good time to buy pc parts but with black friday/xmas around the corner it would be good to wait for those days.

If you mean, "is now the time of year", the answer is no with the possible exception of some true blow-out Cyber Monday type deal. The dead of summer is the cheapest time. However, it is also the cheapest time for turnkey systems. Corporations buy tens of thousands of disk, CD, DVD and other drives, and the same for processors, motherboards, video cards, power supplies and cabinets. They get a price that is untouchable for you as a onesie buyer. Good luck if you can save $50 building your own, and even better luck if it goes belly-up when you fire it up or even later on. Unless you just want to do this for the "experience", forget about it.

Doing a straight comparison of what you could get from dell or hp and building it yourself, you'll save a lot of money, even without the massive sales. That's a pretty nice budget though and you can get a pretty decent computer for gaming.