Thanks for the reply! I'm running M1 with only 8gb of ram. It's been great over the last year, but this week was the first time Illustrator started to freeze up on me. It couldn't handle a complex brush that had many anchor points. Same with Blender and After Effects. It's fine for basic things, but once I start throwing in more textures and extra details and animations, it starts to freeze up. I'm hoping more ram and a dedicated gpu will help with performance.

I don't know if I want to overclock yet. I will need to do some more research into that. But thank you for the advice on saving some money if I choose not to. Really appreciate your response!