Fraps recording questions

Hello,

I'm no expert on the subject, but here's my two cents

Fraps is among the easiest programs to get going (ie user-friendly). One of the most important things that I've seen being recommended when you're recording with fraps is that you get a separate HDD to put the raw video on different from the HDD on which you have your game installed and OS. Reason being, and this is especially the case for MMOs, if you're off the same HDD the game and fraps, fraps needs a constant amount of bandwidth to write to the HDD, while the game loading something from the HDD varies, some games load the whole map at load screen and that's it, unfortunately this isn't the case with most MMOs as the areas are rather large, so they tend to load things as you move around the map, which could occasionally require a lot of HDD bandwidth and will interfere with fraps. Plus, windows will always have some *** going on in the background, it's inevitable, so you don't want your OS interfering with your fraps stream write process.

Now all that said and done, fraps writes raws, which require huge amount of space for good quality depending on your resolution. I've heard that there are other recorders that encode the video right away (this requires more horsepower from your CPU or GPU if the app supports hardware acceleration, however, either one will put extra strain on your hardware and diminish your game performance).

As I personally haven't used any of the said programs in depth, I cannot offer a comparative opinion on whether one or the other is better.

From the hardware perspective, your system looks alright, it's not top of the line but it's a decent entry level gaming rig, so as long as you're able to run your games on medium to get decent enough FPS for recording prog I think you shouldn't be happy with that. Obviously, you could invest in better hardware, but that would depend on two things:
1. what does the recording program require to work full speed (does it work solely off CPU or does it have good GPU acceleration support so CPU task is minimal?)
2. which part of your system (CPU vs GPU) is getting maxed out during your current usage

Once those two questions are answered you could look for potential upgrades, for now I'd say try out a few different progs yourself and see how you like them and how well they perform on your PC. I'm interested to hear your opinion on Fraps vs MSI Afterburner. Perhaps somebody else would come along and offer their opinion/advice on the subject with more in-depth knowledge than mine.

I hope that helps, even if not much

awesome thanks =D I personally use an external WD 1tb drive for fraps to write to, which has helped. Im thinking of maybe getting a second GTX550Ti to go sli with if my psu will handle it =/

Like i said in the OP, I tried using msi afterburner's built in recorder but i cant get it to record no matter what i do   plus it took me 10 minutes to find the recorder settings ¬¬ nicely hidden on a option tab slider bar.
I've also tried DxTroy in the past, and, low and behold, i fell out with that bit of software, I found it too complicated for me, who has about an hour's experience in video editing/game play recording =D

I'll run a few things and watch to see what gets maxxed out, gpu or cpu like you said, I think, as i have a Logitch G510 keyboard, My cpu hits around 70/90% usage when recording, with a over clock. I''ll try and find something to monitor the gpu usage in real time and see how much thats being stressed.

I'll see if i can fiddle with a few things so i can record at full 1080p instead of a windowed 720p. Then all I have to battle with is my insanely slow upload speeds  
I think I get 700kbps download and something like 60/100kbps upload /sigh.

anyway thanks for your help =D

external, as in USB2? that's hell of slow, it'd be better if you take it apart and put it inside

also, take a look at this thread,
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum2.php?config=tom...

yeah, that upload sux, sorry to hear