I make gameplay videos from my various games. I currently use fraps but it causes significant fps lag whilst recording.

If I were to install a TV Tuner card in the same PC as my graphics card, then ran an S-Video cable from my graphics card output to my tuner's input, would this alleviate the stress caused by software recording?

Is recording from a graphics card on the same PC as the tuner even possible?

Reason I ask is that I'm told that tv tuner's cause very minimal lag and use little system resources since they do hardware encoding on their own.

Wonder if you can run the output to a laptop or something. Good question.

I don't have direct experience with what you are suggesting but I have used FRAP's in-game and I have recorded TV with a Tuner card and I'm not sure if it would be much faster honestly. Tuner cards with hardware encoding *should* be faster in theory but the software which runs them is usually so bad that it would probably negate this benefit. If I had to compare the subjective slow-down for each method (FRAP's vs Tuner Record) I would say they were about the same.

If you had a laptop or spare system you could always off-load the recording to it but that may not be an option for you - plus it's kinda of inefficient in a way. If you do want to try it though make sure you get a tuner card and not a USB dongle, as I'm not certain if they have hardware encoding built into them.

Have you tried playing with the CPU affinity to get FRAPS to run on a differnt core than the game and have it creating the file on a disk seperate from the game?

Hmm, I figured that it would cause some lag.

And Dr B, I actually thought about setting the affinity to a single core operation with fraps but never followed through. I would imagine I'd have to set the affinity to 1 for fraps and 2 for the game. I'll have a 7750 BE tomorrow so that will be better than my current 5000+ BE.

I went ahead and bought a Hauppauge Win TV PVR 150 MCE Kit TV Tuner today online for $29.99 (regular $83). I figured it's too good of a price to pass up plus I'm sure I could use it for recording console footage and such.

On the other hand, I could assign whatever tv tuner software to it's own core as well...

I heard there are some real good 3rd party solutions out there for these cards.

But isn't NTSC max resolution 720x480? Will it know to record my current 1280x1024 monitor resolution and just shrink it to 720x480? You know what I mean right?

Questions, questions, questions, at least I know I didn't waste my money, great deal for a tv tuner either way.

I also bought an Accelero Twin Turbo VGA cooler since I'm having some heat issues with my current card today. Any experience? They say on a 9600GT it's 26C cooler and all I'm looking for on my 8800gt is like a 5-10C drop.

I put one of those coolers on one of my 3870's to test it. Friggin thing works. Far higher overclocks and temps that are 10 degrees lower idle and under load its even better. If you are using it on an Nvidia card you can easily control the fan speed, I just plugged in right into my psu with an adapter and its still pretty quiet. you'll like it.

I saw that deal and was tempted as well but I want to wait until there's some more reviews for tuner cards with Windows 7 before getting another. If you're running RC1 or even Vista let us know what you think of it. I'm still trying to get my ATI TV Wonder working again under Windows 7 but I think it might be more of a problem of it working with an nVidia video card since it worked fine with the two ATI cards I have previous to it.