Recording Programs for games and whatnot

So recently, i decided to test out some game recording software versions, so heres a small review of it all.

Fraps - In the overall, it is very user friendly, easy to set up, easy to use and gets the job done, however.

Recording at fullsize while playng a game like Battlefield 3 your fps will drop substantially. There are many reasons for this, first, you need to have a seperate  and/or (fast) hard drive with a large 32MB or better buffer. 

Recording in HD 1920*1080 is a lot of data in a small ammount of time. It is also only lightly packed.
*not sure if this is true, because other programs tend to write even more data, so perhaps fraps uses somekind of compression what uses some level of cpu or gpu, just found it on some forum.
Average 30 minute recording is about 15GB of space. Also a decent GPU is recommended, i havent tried with low end yet, and i propably never will, but im sure it will cause a lot of problems when your game is allready running on low frame rate.

*Sidenote, game fps will be capped at double the rate of your recording fps. So if you are recording at 30FPS, game will run at 60FPS, it wont go higher, however it can go lower.

This should not affect average users tho, since half size - you cut the resolution in half meaning less data to record works just fine with your standard 5400 rpm hard drive.

Also you will haveto buy the program, for 30 euros to be able to do fullsize recording without any watermarks on it. You can get it on www.fraps.com.

Xfire - Xfire is a sort of a chat/track/record/brodcast program. It is completely free, very easy to set up aswell and unlike Fraps, it wont have any fps drops while recording. On the downside, it does not pack the video files, so expect 50-100GB video files. It is not a bad thing, since you will need another program to compress it later on anyway, but if you do not have a 1TB HD space, you will need to constantly convert and delete the files.

Another problem that i noticed was that, i could not play the recorded data straight away, not with VLC atleast. I didnt explore the problem any further, and its propably an easy fix. 

Now, since i got what i wanted, i didnt fully test other software like Qobi or WeGame. But if anyone is interested, somebody allready made a short review of them at:

http://www.labnol.org/software/download/how-to-record-computer-game-videos-for-youtube/2205/

*Update
Now for those who are still searching, id recommend Bandicam. Its easy to use, and does not require an external hard drive to record for a long time. Easy to use and set up, has many options for both video and audio recording, all in all, propably one of the best screen recorders out there.