Nah, it's not sound card related. It's more a general system runs out of resources, causing the sound to hitch and the game to crash thing that randomly effects people with all types of PC's, athlons, intels, nvidia, ati ... everyone and anyone. Probably only affects 1% of people, but those that have it are fubr.
One of the recommended fix's was to fiddle with sound cards. I went one step further and bought a whole new one, being the top of the range (practially) audigy2. My old sound card was a 5 year old budget model, so it was time to upgrade it anyway.
Didn't help HL2 still crashes.
And now the damn sound card doesn't detect my subwoofer on my altec langsings ac54s. Rest of the sounds are 'probably' better
If only I had some proper teenfuns girls moaning samples to test it on.
Yeah, so I think its due to a whole system not happy thing. But I guess that's what I get for going the super budget upgrade, with all 'top of the range budget parts'
ie the top range graphic card, but the cheapest (read dodgiest) model. It doesn't like it when the PC gets overstressed, and HL2 being the newest most resource intensive game is bound to stress it.
I think I'm going to buy a athlon64 939pin 3500 CPU, throw in a PCIe nvidia6600GT... and if I'm game a second one in SLI mode. (If I suddenly find a reason to 'not need cash')
Mobo / CPU / vid card as above would set me back $199 + $385 + $350 in the best discount store in Aus.
So it may be damn pricey to get to play HL2.