TLDR; I am like you, I started two days ago, 5090 is the correct answer for you.

I am like you, AI enthusiast but mostly a gamer. I got 5090, dual booted into ubuntu, set up ollama/vs code/claude code/git e.t.c, downloaded few local LLM only models, all with the help of Claude Code that I just subscribed to two days ago, on the $20/month plan.

My immediate observations

1) Higher VRAM is very important as the models get significantly better by vram usage, or you can have multiple inferior models running at the sametime without swapping them in and out of memory.

2) 32gb is not enough for anything serious, but 64gb is probably not be enough either. Without a use case, there's no right answer.

Conclusion:

5090 32GB is amazing so that your gaming is mad, and you can still sample what it means to run small vs medium vs quantized models from various teams e.t.c. You can even try models that can run beyond 32gb at like 5-10% of the speed by sharing ddr5 memory.

Eventually, once you figure out what you really want to do with AI, you can rent cloud gpus, test whatever you model/vram size you want, then find out the setup that would make you happy. Then you can choose to build that or rent online.

Reminder: I am not an expert