Poor Half-Life 2 Performance With New PC

[ZeFyre]

Greetings!

I just put myself together a new PC with the following hardware:

- AMD Sempron 2400 CPU @ 1.67GHz

- ASRock K7 Upgrade-880 Motherboard

- 512MB Kingston PC2700 Single Channel Value RAM

- 80GB Seagate Barracuda SATA/150 Hard Drive

- nVidia GeForce FX 5500 256MB AGP 8x

- On-board C-Media 5.1 3D Audio

- On-board VIA Rhine NIC

I am experiencing poor performance (random frame and audio hitches) in Half-Life 2, and it's extremely annoying. My older machine, in fact, had much better performance in HL2.

Any suggestions or feedback would be appreciated!

Thanks!

--Quinn

[Dobby]

I heard about some problems with HL2 audio.

Have you done the usual?

• Installed the latest nVidia drivers (BTW the FX cards are by far the crapest nVidia have ever made. I never thought I'd switch to ATI but I've just bought a 9800 Pro and am pretty pleased. That's not to say I won't switch back however. nVidia just had a bad day when they came up with the FX range. I know I bought one!)
  
• Next check your sound drivers
  
• Often overlooked but can also be the cause are the motherboard drivers. I always use the chipset manufacturers drivers because the board manfacturers are always behind. Naturally.
  
• Have you checked the HL2 forums?
  

Some of this is pretty obvious but I mention it because there are some specific issues that have been mentioned regarding HL2. nVidia recently updated their drivers to fix some issues with HL2 so check it out.

[SiMoNsAyS]

the audio glith is normal on "all" the systems. the latest online patch from valve solves it.

you can see my system specs on my signature and i still have those problems (1024x768 detailed models and AA4x, Filtering Trilinear). anyway your video card is a bit old and probably could not handle HL2 the same as a 5950 or even a radeon 9800 non-pro.