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Hi. I take your question as the occasion for making a small update on what I wrote above.
Regarding your needs, it's only about how much money you have to spend... and a couple of other things.
- Forget the RAM and focus on the Vram (GPU):
Ai generation is made to use only the graphic card, than it can "fall back"on Ram if the loaded models are exceeding the Vram, but than the generation will be fully performed at the slowest speed available and take ages... times 8 or 10.
(cpu: DDR4:2800mhz; DDR5 4400Mhz - Gpu: GDDR6 9000Mhz; GDDR7: 11000Mhz)
[I should use the iterations/second values (much bigger difference), but Mhz are more commonly understood].
So spare the money on the Ram and buy a better MoBo (pcie5+Nand M2) and/or Gpu.
- 12GB Vram is kind of.. in the middle?:
It's better more than less.. but the situation is different from the videogames where there is an actual problem (because the devs are deft... but hopefully will be solved by texture compression eventually).
The vast majority of dictionaries (Vae) which are always fully loaded is fp8 (7.3GB) or fp16 (14.2GB) than 32 and so on...
I might be wrong but I don't recall seeing models for 12GB, so you would be stuck with fp8 models anyways or risk to fall in the abovementioned case. (doublecheck on that, specially for GGUF models).
In this optics the Intel Ark 16GB could represent the best budget option for AI, but than the computer is ment to be an all-arounder machine, that's why (no matter what the youtubers are payed to yell) Intel LG1700 +Nvidia (+Shitdows) is still the way to go in my opinion (budget, compatibility, stability, productivity, multy-task performance bla bla bla..).
Don't take it for granted, since the situation is litterally changing every day, just be safe and compare the numbers, as many promoters/reviewers often "forget" to mention the weak spots. In any case, if you can, go for a 16gb card.
For who is still not asleep... now the small update:
There is a new version of the "Wai Rectifier" Lora (A14), which is lighter-effect but much more precise, and now works well also with SDXL Lightning 4steps (twice as fast than Hyper in Fooocus) with more than acceptable results (if you're using a good quality model/lora obviously).