Never buy a stock PC.

gavpowell

To be fair, none of the extra components you added are particularly high-consumption - optical drives and hard drives are about 13W a piece under load, a few watts for the PCI card. People tend to encounter power issues more when they upgrade their graphics card.

The main issue I have had with off-the-shelf PCs, especially Dell, is their cases and motherboards are designed specifically for each other, so when I've come to replace the motherboard in a system, I've found the case has a built-in blanking plate as part of the case, and/or the power switch is a bespoke design/wiring.

Given the price of "official" replacement parts is horrendously expensive, it usually ends up with a new machine, which is a shame for the sake of a 70 quid repair.

rosejack

There's no way you can generalise like that. If you have the experience and knowledge to build your own (I do, and have done so) then it may be easy for you to see the benefits of doing this over buying a stock one. Conversely, there are many people out there who don't have this knowledge nor would benefit from gaining it, and for whom a stock PC would be perfectly adequate.