ScratchMonkey

Note that onboard doesn't exclude PCI. The motherboard typically has its own "private" PCI bus for local peripherals. Try opening Device Manager and switch the View to "By Connection". Then look at how all the busses are wired together, and you'll get an idea of how far communications has to travel from a given peripheral back to the CPU and the main memory bus.

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burble

bleh. i recently reinstalled HL2 and have the exact same issue, which plagued me over a year ago...when i had a completely different rig.

and valve 'fixed' it? they must be in cahoots with EA and dice...

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Xink

im playing through with it dispite the issues, the problem is with the way the engine preload certain sounds, you will notice more stutter during scenes with voice acting as there are larger sound files being loaded in, during normal exploration and gun fights the stutter is bearly noticable, im still quite early in the game though and expect it to get worse as things start to hot up.

A possible solution to this problem is to preload all the sounds before playing, check out

http://forums.steampowered.com/forum...hreadid=353850

i cant be bothered to go to all this trouble so i cant tell you if it works.

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Rampage

It's not *much* trouble using the current method (as long as you have at least 1 gig RAM). I was skeptical, but it does seem to make a significant difference with this issue.
Basically, once you get the files copied to the proper folder, just bring up the console and type "exec 0", pick the sound file to load from the list, and go.

Make sure you follow the link on the first page of this very long post for the "easier-to-use" version.