I use a custom builder when I need a new desktop (laptops, well a good midrange machine is fine for the basics, even Photoshop). Every part is selected by me, and with installation it costs maybe $300 over what I'd spend myself for the same components, and the cabling is a lot neater than I'd ever do and it comes with a total warranty on top of the individual warranties of the components. I put together a liquid cooled gaming machine with SSD's and a top range video card for a little less than an XPS with specs below it (don't get me started on Alienware prices)
So when my daughter started architecture school she needed a real workhorse. Being in the "creative" field she did have a Macbook Pro with all the bells and whistles (yes, I know, but wait, the story changes).
She needed to run Creative Suite, primarily PS and Illustrator, and more important, Rhino and AutoCAD for all her designs and 3D renderings. A Mac Pro desktop to do that was $10K decked out.
So I went back to Maingear, my original builder, and got her a tower with 8 hot swappable hard drive bays, a server motherboard with a 6 core Xeon processor, 32 GB RAM, a 500 GB SSD (they were still really expensive back then) plus a 2 2 TB internal drives, and most important an Nvidia Quadro video card that was the single most expensive component of the whole thing. The case alone weighed about 40 pounds and all told close to 50 with the power supply ( I think it was an 800W if not more power supply). At the end of each semester she needed her boyfriend to help move it for her until the next semester's studio work began. Total cost was about $3,600.
While her classmates were sitting watching a single 3D rendering take 3-4 hours to complete, her's were done in under 45 minutes, so she actually could get more than 3 hours of sleep a night (architecture school is brutal).
She still has it, and just like my stuff, every single item can be easily replaced and upgraded. The case alone will last forever (just about every mounting configuration for a motherboard you can imagine), and as is it's still more than fast enough for her needs. Same as my gaming machine.
Not a knock against retail computers, most of them are more than enough for all but crazy demanding software (and PS isn't even all that demanding unless you're dealing with giant psd images with 64 layers and batch processing 100 RAW images). But if you need demanding stuff like high end video editing or 3D rendering (or Bitcoin mining), going with custom is in the end more cost effective. If you can do it yourself, great. If not, there are decent custom "boutique" assemblers out there for not all that much more when you figure out total costs and your individual needs.
