I played some half-life on my p3, see below.
I don't believe anybody just builds and then they're off to the races. Sure, some people get lucky, and others don't stop and pay attention to frame rates, and others I've seen go as far as buying all factory sealed boxes for the e-peen. I've been building and playing my entire life, and I had many, many frustrating builds. In fact just recently it took me weeks to sort out a memory issue with a modern AMD FX 8320 build, most people would have just let the memory default to 1333 and never thought twice, but I was aware of the issue and just had to find a way to fix it.
Generally a Slot 1 rig is a bit more friendly than say building a 386 rig, but not always. As I said, I've had to go through multiple iterations of all of my machines, and even having bought a brand new in box intel se440bx-2, the entire PC will crash crazy if i so much as hit F1 when playing dos games. Windows 9x is well known for stability issues as well, if you're not crashing win98, you're doing something wrong IMO 😜. It's usually just simple things like minimizing and bringing back up a game or changing settings, but it's very easy to crash. I think you're just a bit too used to modern computers. If you read system reviews in the late 90s, reviewers always counted how many times the system would crash during the review period.
I still suggest you run memtest and surface scan your hard drive to rule out any memory or drive issues.Also make sure all software is closed when you're running half-life, even hardware monitors and light programs like fraps can slow these old pcs down.
Anyway, I got a bit addicted to half-life on mine tonight and got up to blast pit. A few things to note, in the first part of the game and in scenes with no AI, Fraps shows 65-72 FPS for me, but the game never FEELS that smooth, it's jittery and clunky. I thought maybe it was the LCD I'm using but Quake felt quite buttery. Half-Life also seems to load far more often than it does on my steam version resulting in just what you said, half second freezes, if an NPC is talking his voice will echo repeatedly. Modern patches have clearly alleviated some of that. My copy is version 1.1.0.8 (brings me back to CS 1.3, when men were men 😜 ). When the dimensional rift hit I saw my frame rate drop down to the low 30s, and same happens during fights. The FPS swings wildly from 72 right down to 3x with a notable stutter/freeze.
I played in OpenGL at 640x480 with high quality audio settings off. DirectX ran horribly slow when I tried it and so does software rendering.
Upon doing a bit more research and taking off my nostalgia glasses, it seems that even 1ghz CPUs - 1.4ghz tualatins and athlons will see this game have hard dips, with results varying between different patches. SO whoever said HL is a CPU intensive game was clearly right, once the action hits this game even puts a big dent in a coppermine 800mhz.
I don't think your frame drops have ANYTHING to do with your competence or luck, I think you may just be seeing how HL runs on a coppermine. Do remember that youtube videos showing the gameplay will always look smoother than it actually was, the video encoding does a good job of making motion look insanely smooth, just watch counter-strike videos to see what I mean.
Finally, I think we should find a patch version that works with one of the old half-life time demos / benchmarks and pass it around vogons for some benches so we can get some honest half-life performance metrics.
Sup. I like computers. Are you a computer?