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https://forums.adobe.com/people/Cactus+Cowboy wrote
I recall reading a post Szalam wrote where he said he had a killer machine something on the order of 76 megs or so of memory and a hot chipset to boot. I doubt there's nothing Adobe has that his box can't handle. The only thing he didn't say was how much it cost. But I'll bet it wasn't much more than a grand. I'll bet it's still upgradeability too.
Yup. 
At home, I put together a computer with more power than you can even buy in a Mac Pro and I did it for under a grand. You can't even get as much processing power on your CPUs or as much RAM as I have in the highest-specced Mac Pro.
It really makes me sad.
Well, happy for me, but sad for Apple because they used to be great.
Trevor.Dennis wrote
You built that for a less than $1000? What currency? I'm expecting to pay around NZ$6k when I get round to rebuilding, and I would love to bring that down. One of the Puget Systems articles from way back tested the advantage of multiple core systems, and found it ever diminishing above four to six core. I took from that that clock speed is king, and a heavily OC'd i7 2700K (this was a while ago) might out perform a six core CPU costing four times as much, if it was running stock speed. Of course there'd be the additional cost of the bigger than average CPU cooling system, but you'd still be quids in.
US Dollars, sorry.
In the USA, there are a LOT of Dell workstations that are barely used on eBay. Many businesses buy new machines every couple of years (whether they need to or not) and they have their IT people "recycle" them, so they end up on eBay. There are so many of them that the prices are really low. Also, I have a significant other who works in IT and loves to shop, so that helped a lot. Some of the parts were used and some were new, but they were all really good deals! Then we just put it all together to make my beast!
For me, I wanted dual Xeons with many cores AND a high clock speed. Many cores because I do a lot of work in Cinema 4D which renders across all of the cores very well. I made sure to get the high clock speed because that's what matters most for After Effects. It's an interesting balance but it works well.
There's all the expertise you'd need on the Adobe Premiere Pro Hardware forum, with regular posters from VideoGuys and ADK.
Videoguys even have articles and guides on DIY systems
DIY Recipes and System Recommendations for Video Editing Videoguys Blog
But ADK also has a wealth of information, and you can always ask on the Premiere Pro forum
Then there is Puget Systems with heaps of excellent articles and real world tests, as well as ready made systems. I love their tests along the lines of will Photoshop keep using all the core/threads you throw at it. In fact they have just posted a Mac Pro vs PC performance article which I will be reading with interest right after I post this
Lastly there is Harm and Bill's PPBM site, but Harm does not keep it as up to date as the commercial sites. It is still an outstanding source of information though.
While the above information if focused on apps like Premiere Pro and After Effects, they are still relevant to Photoshop and the other Adobe apps. You can be reasonably sure that hardware up to scrubbing several 4K tracks with effects in real time, will handle Photoshop.
These are also exciting times with uber fast M.2 drives capable of 3.5Gb/s and at decent capacities and very reasonable costs. CPU development has slowed down in recent years, but it is still worth upgrading to get lots of fast RAM, the above mentioned drives, and outrageous GPU performance. Chris Cox (who we all miss since he left Adobe) once told us on the Photoshop forum, that memory and mainboard bus speed was the bottleneck at that time. My box is five years old now, and built with help from Harm, Bill, Eric and the guys on the PremPro Hardware forum. I was proud as can be that it held 4th place on the PPBM5 results table for a good while, and it still sits at 17th place out of the 1300 systems on that table. Of course that table has not been updated for a few years now, but it is a useful guide on what works, and the difference GPU assistance makes. It's notable that the highest placed Mac system in that table is way down at 661st out of the 1351 entries. I am afraid I have no idea of how that might look today, but I assume (hope) the Puget System article I linked to above is going to answer that.
(Click to expand)
I will be replacing my system some time this year, and while I have not decided on the full spec to date, it will have 64Gb of the fastest RAM I can find, and either six or eight cores with priority going on speed. It will certainly need to run better than 4Ghz. It will have at least one 1Tb M.2 drive, and maybe a second via whatever interface is needed. I'll use the GTX970 out of this box for starters, to keep cost down (and put the original GTX570 back in before handing on to my wife). Note: I was originally going to build my new system at the beginning of this year, but have had to delay, so the above specs will probably already be superseded.
So would I buy an Adobe branded hardware system? Not a chance. You need to make the most of the flexibility that the modular build design a PC gives you, to make the system that best suits your needs.
I read the Mac Pro vs a couple of Puget Systems PC workstations, and it turns out nothing much has changed. The $5K PC wipes the floor with a $9.4K Mac Pro 
I have created somewhat of a hybrid by putting a really nice Adobe-branded 'skin' on my Macbook Pro. It looks pretty stylish and reinforces the Adobe brand rather than Apple's.
I found it at MAX a couple years ago and it's still looking good. I realize this isn't exactly what you had in mind, but there are some nice Adobe swag items that could soup up the look of your hardware.
Buck
Buck, Paul Trani had an outrageous laptop cover at MAX last year. I'm pretty sure he mentioned its source near the beginning of his session, but it was an excellent presentation, and I got a lot more out of it than I expected to. He billed it as Top 10 Photoshop Tips & Timesavers but he flew through them at breakneck speed for an hour, so there would have been nearer to 100.
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