What Does Each Hardware Element do for Blender?

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#1

I’m planning to upgrade my hardware for better functioning of Blender. Most probably I will build a PC with best parts I can afford. I have this ‘Hardware Requirements’ list given on the Blender website. I am wondering which hardware parts (CPU, RAM and Graphics Card) are more important for which tasks in Blender? If we have to choose to get higher capacity of one, or two of them, and not other, which are more important?

As of now I mostly plan to do modeling, sculpting and animation, plus some video editing.

What is obvious to me is that higher capacity graphics card will speed up renders and improve viewport display.
Would higher core number of CPU enable us to simultenously work on various tasks in multiple windows of Blender?
As of RAM, I have almost never seen RAM usage go above 1GB with whatever I have so far done in Blender. In some tutorials that I have watched of complex sculpts with 4+ million polygons, RAM usage is still only under 2GB. So what would 32 GB RAM be required for?

(At present I have dual core CPU, 1 GB built-in graphics unit and 8 GB RAM on a MacBook)

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#2

Render production scenes, working with 4K or higher images/videos, for example.
See Cycles sample scenes, like “Cosmos laundromat demo” or “Agent 327 Barbershop”:

In blender there are tasks that are Single threaded tasks, and other multi-thread tasks. The recommendation for general use in Blender is that you choose a CPU with good single thread performance:

In addition, the number of CPU threads is also important, especially if your system will be destined to render with CPU in Cycles.

Graphics card is always important, and the higher vRAM the graphics card has, the better (for Eevee and for Cycles)

RAM amount depends on the work you will do in Blender. If you buy AMD CPU make sure you buy RAM with the highest speed that you can buy. If you don’t know how much RAM to buy yet, at least make sure your motherboard will allow you to add more RAM in the future if you need it.

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#3

Thank you @YAFU for the information, it was very helpful. Yesterday I also came upon this article, which clarified things further for me:

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