John,
I agree with you that most of CAD tools today are very CPU intensive applications. If I had a blank check, I whould buy fastet CPU, most RAM my hardware/software will support, biggest solid state drive and most imprtently a excellent graphics card with a good processor on it and a lot of RAM. You know as well as I do that CPU can unload most if not all of the graphics task to the graphics card procesor thus improving performance. In addition to that I will not buy today any laptop let alone a desktop where I wont be able to install 32 GIG RAM that CPU will use.
I hope this helps.
Regards, Yan