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The primary advantage that you have when building your own desktop is that you can tailor it to your own specific needs and/or wants. Typically, however it is difficult to actually save much if any money.

I once put together a dozen identical desktops with Windows XP for friends and family who were constantly hounding me for computer support. Everything was the same including the assortment of software. I also purchased some extra parts which came in very helpful.

This experiment was very successful... when someone called on the phone with a problem, I would fire up the extra computer that I kept for support and use it for reference as they described the issue that they were having while I typically used “Windows Remote Assistance” to see the problem for myself... Of course, many problems at that time were solved by just having them turn the computer off and then back on again. And many others were just problems where people were trying to do something that they were not familiar with.

This was in the days before “high speed internet” was available so Remote Assistance ran much clunkier than when I help someone with the “Quick Assist App” introduced with Windows 10. Despite the pace of improvements to computers over time I still managed to keep these computers going for years. I still have a couple of them in storage.

I did quite a bit of research when shopping for components and was able to get some good deals, but these computers were still not as inexpensive as some of the name brand computers available at the time. But they had features and capabilities that most name brand computers did not at that time. And even back then manufacturers were hobbling the bios and loading down their machines with tons of crapware.

I have been very happy with the “gaming” laptop that I purchased. It is amazing how quickly a decent GPU can render 4k video even in a laptop as long as you have a cooling pad underneath it. I was pretty happy with the laptop that I have been using for years, but I don’t bother with it for video projects or anything very processor intensive these days.

The new laptop that I purchased is Intel and NVIDEA based but I feel that Ryzen based computers have been a far better value for the last several years. I purchased my wife an 8th generation Ryzen 7 based Dell laptop recently at Costco. It was marked down $250 to $550. It has impressive performance for a “budget” laptop without a separate GPU. The Radeon 700M integrated GPU is vastly superior the integrated GPUs on Intel processors. Her previous laptop has an inexpensive discrete GPU but the new Ryzen 7 laptop easily outperforms it in every way. It actually plays Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 without any problem with medium settings.

I tend to open multiple browsers and leave a lot of tabs open as well depending on what I am doing. But I start closing them when the tabs get so small that you can’t read the headings. It is helpful for cross referencing but tends to make things confusing when you go to far with things.

I think that it is great that you have put together a new computer that better fits your needs. I do think that it is worth the trouble most of the time. I also enjoy tinkering. My current interest is trending toward the home server realm which also an area where starting with a good platform can be helpful... So, I am not sure exactly which way I will go with it.