AJH, here, providing a completely ON-POINT, REAL ANSWER TO THE POSTED QUESTION:
Okay, here's a few real resolutions and answers from someone who actually uses chrome tabs and browsing the same way you do and had the exact same problem with my old laptop.
So I had all the same issues as you on my old system, got a new one, and spent a lot of time monitoring the app's usage in Task manager (over the past several years) and these are my conclusions:
Basically, RAM is the single most important feature. Then CPU, and lastly your GPU (which doesn't really matter at all).
You NEED minimum 32 GB RAM. Chrome eats RAM more than anything else. My new system has 32 GB, but I'm consistently riding 16 GB usage with a couple-hundred tabs open (all different content- my usual browsing usage). So if you only get 16GB you won't have room for other processes and also when you load chrome it will probably crash if you have it starting your entire tab history/previous browsing session (like I do). - Please note that this usage is WITH the extension I suggest (below) running.
A multiple-core system is a must since chrome really takes advantage of multi-threading capabilities unlike some programs, but something like an 8th gen i7 is definitely overkill (I'm running that on my new system and chrome can't even dent it - it's only using a measly 2-6% of my CPU on average). I know it's a generous range, but my old laptop was a duo core which definitely isn't enough since my normal chrome usage on it ate 37 - 100% of my CPU usage on average- crashing consistently upon startup when loading large sessions). I'd say an i5 would perform decently and be the most budget-friendly CPU to handle this kind of chrome usage.
Install "The Great Suspender" (chrome extension) - normally I'd advise you to uninstall un-needed extensions since they tax your usage of chrome most, but this one simply saves your RAM and CPU by not keeping every single tab loaded all the time. You won't lose any info that you've loaded into forms since it recognizes those and doesn't suspend them, but other tabs that are inactive will simply "un-load" and refresh when you come back to them. Plus you can customize the extension to never "suspend" tabs from certain sites of your choosing. Definitely a life-saver and a better solution that most people's advice which is simply, "just don't use that many tabs!" Note - ironically, "The Great Suspender" does cost a fair chunk of RAM to run, but pales in comparison to other chrome extensions, incognito tabs (my next point discussed below), and is definitely worth it for how much it saves you in RAM usage if you had all your tabs fully-loaded like usual.
Next piece of advice, NEVER use chrome's incognito tabs or windows unless you absolutely need them and then only use them for that specific duration and close them immediately. I recently discovered when chrome managed to throttle it's CPU usage of my amazingly spec-ed out new desktop to 100% (and keep it there) that the incognito tabs were sucking a horrific amount of my CPU's power. I only had 7 open at the time, and it was only when I shut down all but 2 or 3 that my CPU usage stabilized to something not resembling cardiac arrest.
Lastly, get friendly with chrome's task manager (shortcut is shift+escape on the keyboard or you can right click on an empty space, provided you have one, to the right of your tabs on the top bar of chrome) which will let you know exactly what pages and extensions you have open that are taxing your system the most. Click on the columns to sort by CPU or Memory usage and decide if you really want that one extension you installed on a lark and never used again that is running your RAM and CPU into the ground, and find out for good if you can take most of the load off by tweaking one or two things about how you browse. Worked for me!
Good luck, and I'm sure that will help!
-AJH
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