Thanks everyone. I really appreciate the informed advice I get here and the patience for people like me. After all this, I think I'll just wait and put the money into my next build.
For those who, like me, who are interested in playing with Stable Diffusion and have an older AMD card (R9 290 w/4GB Vram in my case), you CAN use it, but it's just slow.
This guy offers a true hand holding through the whole install, but make sure you watch the end about memory. This basically involves adding an argument to the batch file either "--lowvram" or "--medvram".
How to run Stable Diffusion on AMD Graphics Cards | AI on AMD Graphics
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePM61L_gq0U
Timestamped part at end about Memory.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePM61L_gq0U&t=2166s
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Thanks everyone. I'm out!