I'm a recent convert from console (360) to pc and am looking to build a gaming pc sometime in the next few months for around $800, maybe $1000 including peripherals. I also plan on using it for video and audio editing as I'm a musician. I've done a bit of web perusing (such as the kill your console for $750) but I'm a total noob and would really like to have an understanding of this stuff before blindly building someone else's machine! E. g. What role does the monitor play in graphics quality? What's the difference between intel and AMD? what is overclocking and why does my stupid iPad autocorrect not recognize that word? My goal with the machine is to create something that can compete with next gen consoles/play new games on descent settings.
Any links or book recommendations on where I can find a basic understanding of computers, specifically gaming pc's? Any general words of advice are also greatly appreciated.
The monitor is a peripheral and all it does is display the information processed by your GPU or APU , depending on what you get. Things that effect the monitor quality are it's resolution (the higher the better, but higher resolution also takes up more resources), the refresh rate of the monitor (showed in hz, 60hz will do fine) and the PPI of the monitor (pixels per inch, basically the resolution to screen size of the monitor).
In order to display all these things on your monitor you need a GPU or an APU (accelerated processing unit, intergrated to your processor). With your budget you can get a decent GPU, I recommend a 79xx series.
Intel and AMD are two companies that make processors and there processors do vary a lot. Recently intel has always had the best performance but AMD has the best performance to price ratio which is important with a budget. If you're going for an intel you would need to go for the i5 and if amd it should be the 8350/8320. You should make up your own mind on this but this one is a hard choice in my opinion. Core to core the i5 is better than the 8350 but the 8350 has 8 cores. This is especially useful as the newer generations of games will start getting optimized for more cores.
Overclocking is getting more performance out of your parts. I would not recommend overclocking for a first time build but if you plan to do it in the future buy either good heatsinks for the CPU or get a watercooler and if you're planning to overclock the GPU you should get a GPU with a decent set of aftermarket fans and a good motherboard that supports overclocking. To put it simply overclocking is when you tune your parts to make them perform better. This is done by normally increasing the hz (frequency) of either the processor or the memory. When doing this you will also need to increase the voltage and this whole process is recommended to be done via the BIOS (which is why a decent mobo is needed for overclocking).
Monitor = resolution and a higher resolution means more pixels which means the graphics card has to work harder.
Intel is more ahead and except the price better than AMD. If you are on a budget, AMD's cpu's are awesome (like the apu's and the fx-6300) but if you spend more on your rig Intel is in my opinion always the way to go. They have less energy consumption and have higher single core performance.
J_T above me explained it already but i was abit bored :p