Getting Back into Gaming

The parts you're talking about would run $4000+ for very little purpose. The monitor would be another $350-500 or so.

You are missing a lot. There is about a minimum of $650 between what you need to game well at 1440p and 1080p. That's your first decision. 4k is way out of reach and doesn't make sense on a reasonably sized 27-32" monitor. The first decision you have to make is what resolution you want. Up to 27", framerates rule over pixel count for gaming visuals. There are dozens of 24-27" 1080p monitors with high refresh rates up to 165fps for under $200. A 3060 Ti GPU will drive one of those with plenty to spare. A combo like that would save you around $800 at these prices over what you would want on an inexpensive 1440p monitor. With the shortage in GPUs, now is not the time to go big in video.

You don't want or need a giant NVMe drive. What you want is breakneck speed for all you do from your OS and apps, and a good SATA drive for your games to load from. Games will not load all that much faster from a faster drive because they have a particular order and routine they must go through to load properly. The heavy premium you'd pay to get 2TB would be mostly wasted. The compact size of your primary drive allows for easy maintenance and super-speedy scanning.

Doing "some photo editing" will benefit from the extra RAM, which is in the budget. A 5900X is overkill and is not available now.

Here's a build that does what you want for $3054.

     3788761      To see it in the Configurator, go to main page, upper right > "Load Config". Copy/paste that #.

If you are dead serious about heavy editing, you could get the 12 core 3900X for about the same price with no loss in gaming performance you would ever notice. The motherboard is better thermals, longevity, and a better choice if you ever need to upgrade your CPU.

32GB RAM

The storage is all you will need for a long while.

The Internal Lighting is free, and you could stretch the budget a tad for the fancy lights. This rig is upgradeable to a 1440p powerhouse any time the price/performance ratio makes sense.

Would have saved me a lot of speculation if you had mentioned the 1440p monitor and why you want it.

You're with the right card for the best performance at 1440p with the 3080. It's got plenty of overhead to spare at the highest settings for all but the worst optimized games. RDR2 is one. You can fix that by turning off multi-sampling anti-aliasing (MSAA). Upgrade to that card and the rest of the build will do what you want it to as is. Hate that the GPUs are so jacked up, but that is the the same everywhere. Is what it is.

Left unmentioned here, the AMD build is a PCIe Generation 4 platform. The Intel CPUs are PCIe 3. The AMD procs are better than Intel at multi-core performance (for editing, for example), and the 5800X will not hold gaming back at all. AMD is currently the better choice.

Hope it helps.