I have unfortunately given up on recording because my system is rather under the weather at the moment besides other things that I don't feel like talking about at the moment..
Dont ever give up!! i gave up awhile back because of the same issue, it could handle recording fine it just wasnt enough for minecraft to look good enough to record. But i got a amazing PC now! Plus my girlfriend of 6 years dumped me so that had a huge impact on why i stopped. But im back and ready to rock n roll!
i'm using quicktime on my mac. it's free. and you can select an area just to record. not using voice though.
Ok, I don't have enough commitment to buy a non-watermarking screen-recorder, and I don't have a pro microphone, and I don't edit my videos, just add captions. So, even though I won't ever be on the YouTuber team, can't I still make promotional videos about the Empire? I already have one, but it's water marked, there's bad audio, and the video itself is bad quality. So, if I can, I will make more videos about EMC and post them.
OpenBroadcast software, you can select it to record as-well, I use it a lot to stream, 1080p looks great and is completely free, open source and no watermarks. Along with being able to add overlays, multiple games etc at once all through one program. It's a good little thing.