I don't think the 5800 would make much of a difference for tabs. If your budget was tighter then the 5600x is a better value CPU, but even that is poor value when compared to the 3600 lol. Assuming you are not going Intel, you could even go all in on a 5900 series or pick up a cheap 3600/3800 (if available) for now then get a better one when everything settles down. None of these would be bad choices, it just comes down to budget and requirements. But with your budget and a 3080 your best bet would be to go for a current gen CPU.
With the reduction in price and wide availability of storage these days, I don't think partitioning is something most people do with home PCs. There's no advantage but there are potential disadvantages.
Unless you are doing specialist activities almost any modern NVME drive is fine. As geeks we prefer to get the Samsung drives, but if you can get a 4.0 drive cheaper than a Samsung 3.0 drive and it has a decent life expectancy then why not?
If your case can fit an internal drive then why bother with an external?
I was thinking of going more budget for the cpu and then upgrading, but seeing as this is the last gen on AM4, I thought the hassle wasn't worth it when I could just get something decent now.
Regarding the SSD, people were recommending to get one smaller drive for the OS and a larger one for everything else (in case I need to reformat the OS), so that's why I mentioned about potentially partitioning to solve that. What would be the disadvantages of partitioning?
There's quite a few pci 4.0 drives cheaper, I'll take a look at some.
I've seen a few cases that don't have room for an internal dvd drive, so thought it best to go for an external one to open up more choice. Would that be detrimental to go with an external one?
The 3080 is quieter than my old 2080 but it's much bigger and uses 100w more power and puts more heat in the case so I have more case cooling which is what makes my PC a bit louder than my old PC.
I'll look into getting more quiet/silent case cooling fans to compensate for this.
Most GPU fans are louder
They are smaller and have a ridiculous amount of heat to shift than case fans.
When you are gaming, are you going to be using headphones?
I use a headset, but even with that I can still hear my fans really loudly when gaming (this could be because it's an old card with dust buildup?).
If you have alot of tabs open then more so more ram you want than a bigger cpu, altho 32gb for most people would be more than enough.
Honestly if anything learning to better manage tabs is way better than spending extra money to accommodate a bad habit(used to have tons of tabs open as well)
If your really set on silent as possible then gotta look at really good airflow cases, get some good fans in and set the best fan curve you can.
Undervolting gpu will go along way to helping as well, less power but keeping same performace meaning lower temps meaning lower rpm fans meaning lower noise.
I've been trying to lower my tab usage and have it at around 50-ish now. Unfortunately I'm normally doing a few different projects at once for work which requires me to keep various tabs open concurrently.
For the case, definitely looking at airflow and front usb ports as priorities.
Regarding undervolting the GPU, it's not something I've done before - I would've thought that would nerf the performance of the GPU?