Best performance-to-quality gaming/video recorder?

[Spikey00]

I'm doing a bit of searching to see which recorder is the best performance wise, while still offering a good quality in the videos it captures--I've tried FRAPS which tends to lag in overall, and I've tried others like Camtasia to no avail.  Not that I was trying to capture video of an incredibly intensive caliber (very low sys. requirements see below, was recording a replay), but it still produced a sub-par video, with lag stutters and the like.

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Pentium 800MHz, 505MB hard disk, Direct3D, DirectX 8, 32MB VRAM, DirectSound, 128MB RAM
I'm going to be trying Xfire's recording software, and see how that goes; I heard it doesn't affect gaming performance, but rather it can throttle the video accordingly.  I'm not looking for amazing quality, I'm just looking for something that is appropriate.  It would also be nice if the software could automatically encode it into something more hard-drive-friendly, rather than having to re-encode it afterward lest you lot don't mind having gigabytes of a short few minutes video.

Short System Specs
- 240GT GDDR5 512MB (this should be fine)
- Maxtor 6L250S0 SETA 30GB currently/250GB @ 7200 RPM (I think; don't suggest getting a separate HD, I cannot afford additional hardware but I know that would help increase performance)
- i820 2.8GHz x2.

Any recommendations from personal experience would be helpful!  Thank you!

[Ozymandiaz]

My friend uses FRAPS rather successfully, but it took him quite some time to figure out how to tune it.

So I guess all the advice I got is maybe to make sure you got FRAPS tuned right?

[Moonshine Fox]

I use FRAPS extensively, but then again, I have a very top of the line computer :/

[Spikey00]

FRAPS doesn't really have anything you can change beyond the FPS you want (which seems to cap your gaming performance to that), and whether or not you want it full or half size (which increase performance but not too much).

I tried Xfire's recorder, and I was lagging in a more heavy-duty application (CoD2) with everything to max (FPS maxed out at refresh rate), though not surprisingly the video recording lagged the game, even if half-size was done.  I'll do some more testing tomorrow, probably will a lower resolution than 1280p.