Thanks for your detailed reply. I made a typo earlier, planning to purchase RAM, SSD and GPU from Amazon.more than enough for even a 4090 system. i would also have suggested buying the psu and ssd locally for the long term warranty support: psu rma will be a pita if need to ship overseas (which is likely if u bought from amazon) and local nvme pricing is pretty good these days.
if ur using the adobe suite like after effects and premiere pro, u would be better off going intel (with igpu) + nvidia, which would also alleviate ur concerns about ram compatibility (ie xmp on am5). u did mention that the kit is on the mobo qvl though, so i dont think there would be anything to worry about. for stable diffusion it is also better to go with nvidia for cuda support (compared to significantly reduced performance of radeon cards for ai workloads), though their limited vram buffers might be an issue. the 7900xt is also really poor value locally anyway.
for the parts to get, these are what i would suggest:
total: $2035
core i7-13700 non f + gigabyte b760m aorus elite ax d5 831 fuwell arctic liquid freezer ii 360 157 tradepac zotac rtx 4070 twin edge 863 tradepac corsair 5000d airflow 184 tradepac
The AMD 7900XT is going from around US$790 (roughly S$1,150 after including shipping and GST). RAM is really much cheaper on Amazon so that makes the most sense. Will be buying the PSU locally in SG.
For the CPU, I'm tossing between Intel (i9-13900K) and AMD (Ryzen 9 7900X). Going the Intel way will save a lot of hassle in terms of software support and RAM compatibility. If I was to go with Intel, any Z790 motherboards to recommend (looking for something with SPFDIF output).
Low VRAM on 4070 is a worry....Nvidia has really made their 4000 series offering quite unattractive (price and specifications wise)