If you disable autostats entirely, you may have to create statistics on selected columns for better performance.
If you have autostats enabled, there are still a few reasons why you may want to create statistics manually:
- You want a higher sample rate, for instance FULLSCAN.
- You want multi-column statistics.
- You want filtered statistics.
I don't think any of these are very common. I have played with these options occasionally, but success has been limited. For instance, multi-column statistics does not give that much, since SQL Server only tracks the density for the second and further columns.
I seemed to recall that I once cooked up a demo where filtered statistics made a difference, but it might have been a far cry from a realistic scenario.