Realizations

Hello, folks. Checking back in with an update on current happenings. I've been keeping myself occupied for the past few weeks, playing a bit of Minecraft Feed The Beast, with the Direwolf20 Mod Pack. I've been having a great time, and have actually gotten a bit of help from my younger brother, who recently purchased a Minecraft account. With my background in IT, setting up a "LAN" game to work over the public Internet is trivial enough as making sure my router has the 50000-60000 port range forwarded to accept connections. (If you have no idea what that means, don't worry, it's not terribly important.)

With respect to my injury, my hand seems to have healed well, and I have an appointment to have the cast removed tomorrow. Hopefully, everything will be working well enough that I can resume work after I move to New York with little to no problems.

Back on the topic of Minecraft, however, I've been playing quite a bit with the FTB/Direwolf20 mod loadout, and have realized a few things. One, ThaumCraft is ridiculously addictive as a mod. Two, my PC is a bloated whale. Fortunately, things have remained "barely" playable, averaging at roughly 20 frames per second in the Overworld. My concern, however, is that as I add more complex automation to my world, the performance will continue to suffer. This isn't to mention the difficulties that are added when I host for my brother to connect. I've been monitoring the performance of my PC, and while I believe there are a few things I can try to improve performance, nothing is ultimately going to solve the problem, other than these two options:

1. I need a newer PC (See Below)
2. I need to consider dedicated hosting (See Further Below)

Option 1 - New(er) PC

I've been using my current PC for less than a year. While I imagined it would do well enough for the short-term, it seems that, with resource-heavy mods, and my penchant for doing things more extreme than necessary, it isn't quite cutting the mustard. For those who have a bad memory, here's what I'm currently using:

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800+ Manchester @ 2.0GHz
RAM: 4GB (4x1GB) DDR 400 (PC3200)
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 4350 PCI-E w/ 1GB VRAM

Not exactly this generation of computer components. (Not even this decade, mind you.) I have parts picked out for an incremental upgrade; just the motherboard, processor, RAM, and graphics. I shopped with a budget of about $300, and managed stay just below that mark. Here's what I hope to upgrade to:

CPU: AMD Phenom II x4 965 Black Edition Deneb @ 3.4GHz (Quad-Core)
RAM: CORSAIR 8GB (2x 4GB) DDR3 1333 SDRAM
GPU: PowerColor AMD Radeon HD 6670 PCI-E 2.1 w/ 1GB VRAM
Board: Foxconn A88GMX

All of these parts are listed on Newegg. I do have a couple minor items on the list, as well. Namely, some thermal compound for the CPU, and a slightly larger case fan. The total, before shipping and taxes is $288.94. Naturally, with things going as they have been, I can expect to wait until I've secured full-time employment before I can afford to spend this amount.

Option 2 - Dedicated Hosting

This is a more feasible option to consider, as it is less expensive, and has additional benefits. I've been looking at hosting packages on CreeperHost.net, and I would imagine that, for myself and my brother, the "Slime Package" for $12.11 USD per month, would be more than suitable. This would off-load hosting pressure from my current system, and would likely make the game run slightly more smoothly, as most of the world tick and processing would be on the dedicated server's hardware. I'll discuss it with my brother and see what he thinks. I'm sure that, once both of us are working, we could easily split the bill on a server.