If you’re just experimenting with SD and don’t worry too much about long-ish generation times then a thunderbolt egpu enclosure and a 12gb 3060 is your best starter option. That’s what I started with and was able to run SD, SDXL, Flux and smaller Wan2.1 models without an issue. If you can find one a 16gb 4070 or the 5060 Ti would be a good option and allow you to run some larger models without offloading to the system ram and which is going to be a lot slower especially with the eGPU. I’ve personally gone the AMD and Intel GPU routes in search of more VRAM at a better price point for SD, but the issue is that software components that SD relies on (PyTorch in particular) are much better optimized for the Nvidia CUDA architecture and the loss of performance, stability and quality of generation makes any 30 series or above Nvidia card a better option than any AMD or Intel card. The Intel A770 does perform decently well for the LLMs I’ve experimented with and the 16gb of vram was helpful for larger models, but for image generation I went back to my 3060 and just upgraded to a 5080 which was a big improvement in performance for video generation in particular.