What a Raw Workflow Asks of a Computer

A photography machine is judged on two things: whether the colour you see is the colour you deliver, and how long you spend waiting between frames. Neither is settled by the headline processor number. Culling depends on how fast previews are built and read back from storage, developing leans on the graphics card, exporting uses every core available, and the newer denoise and masking tools will not run properly at all without enough graphics memory behind them.

Buy in that order. Enough graphics memory to unlock the software's accelerated features, system memory sized for the files you actually open, storage arranged so the catalogue is never the thing holding you up, and a display you can calibrate and keep calibrated. A quicker processor helps at the margins, but it will not rescue a machine that is short in any of those four.