which card do you mean? other similar performance cards are generally a bit more expesive, 7800xt is cheaper than 7900gre but performance goes down by similar margin, so both seem great value

Hmm, I didn't even consider it, but could work out for me as well, at least for a while, as I already have a laptop which works really well, just the gpu is what really needed an upgrade.
@OwlYaYeet please help me with these doubts-

1. how is steamOS for privacy (steam stuff), I it possible to stop all steam related activity.
2. How easy it is to setup lutris/heroic to play my gog games? (compared to setting it up on regular arch let's say)

forgot to answer the second point, moving would be great, laptop + egpu would work, would help while travelling. But a desktop sounds more interesting without the comprosises, could get a weaker laptop for travel if needed I guess.

Luckily, I got really exhausted and frustated, so hopefully it ended for now.
I'll do mostly browsing, programming, some servers always running in the background like jellyfin.
Then I'll be playing single player games on 2k ultrawide. Thinking all AMD for now, I'll consider nvidia for path tracing for the next upgrade, but don't need ray tracing for now.
Would like to reasonably futureproof it.

Thanks, great advice.

This is not recommended for USB connected drives

Stopped gnome-disks format at 78% (~6 hours remaining).
Used #sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=1M seek=1001250 status=progress, write speed is ~100 MB/s.
Thanks a ton!

It's connected over USB 3, it's SMR

Yes I am overwriting it with zeroes while formatting (using gnome-disks). I didn't know it did multiple overwrites, thought it did 1 pass overwrite with zeros.

Yup I am zeroing it.

That explains the declining speed. Thanks a lot for the insight!