I've tried just about every piece of software out there trying to find something that doesn't give me choppy FPS when screen capturing. My GENERAL settings are:

30 fps
Uncompressed AVI
1680x1050

I have the correct video drivers for my video card which is an ATI 1900xt with 512mb onboard ram and my pc is an AMD 2.5ghz quad CORE with 8gb ram 64bit. There's no reason I should be having this problem. I'm guessing this is boiling down to a codec issue but I'm not sure... Any help would be appreciated.
Hello, and welcome to the forums.
Generally, recording video WHILST GAMING will cause a performance hit.
30fps at 1680x1050 is a lot of data to process - where is it going? In other words, what storage device are you using? That's often a major bottleneck for this sort of thing.
Have you tried dropping the quality settings on the game or recording?Thanks for the warm welcome. Programs like Fraps work just fine for gaming. I'm trying to do standard desktop recording. The data is stored on the primary partition on my standard internal sata hd. Regardless of what FPS I use OR even droping the resolution of my monitor, it always acts like it's recording 15 fps.