For any of you still having issues... I seem to have found a "fix" that doesn't fully cure the issue, but seems (for me, at least) to lessen the issue immensely.

It dawned on me that my audio was cutting out during these hiccups, so I took a look at my sound settings and found:

snd_mixahead .05

The new fps configs seem to be using this command. The stock setting is .1

I changed this to .07 and went from hiccuping every 20-30 seconds to maybe once every two minutes. I haven't had time to mess with this further, but later on I will set it back to stock .1 and see what is what.

So yeah, try that if you are having issues with hiccups and have that setting in your autoexec. I have a feeling that if I set it back to .1 it should go away completely -- that's my hope, at least.

That's pretty interesting, maybe it was too good to be true after all. I think before this gets confirmed more people should test with different settings and see if they still get freezes.

I played some more at snd_mixahead .08 and i only stuttered twice in about 90 minutes of play... and those stutters could very-well have just been weird lag or something else at this point.

So, as far as I am concerned... FOR MY SYSTEM, this is the fix I was looking for. So, I would check it out if you are as desperate for a fix as I was. It can't hurt giving it a shot, eh?

My question now is... why can the majority of players with snd_mixahead .05 get the game working just fine? I have a decent system... i5/gtx 660ti/ 16 gb ram, etc. Could it be that I'm using on-board sound and maybe my motherboard from 2012 doesn't like this setting? That's the only thing I can think of...

if this is true then i'm sure that valve has somehow broken something a little bit. i've been using .5 on snd_mixahead for more than 2 years and i've never experienced these short freezes until recently.

i honestly doubt it's snd_mixahead causing this issue for me, but i guess i'll give the default .1 a try today.

Hawler messaged me through the site with this:

"Suave, it is also a fix for my system and it's not an old one (2012+) so I think the command might be related with internet stability issues, because it made my ping a little less variable as well.

I might be wrong but that's my perception of testing these commands for an hour on a full pub server:

Before
*cl_loadondemand_default 0
*mat_queue_mode -1
*snd_mixahead 0.05
(stuttering every 15-25 seconds, loss@1-3, choke@1-50)

After
*cl_loadondemand_default 0
*mat_queue_mode -1
*snd_mixahead 0.08
(stuttering every 5 minutes, loss@0, choke@1-5)

So IMO, snd_mixahead at 0.05 might be just for non-fragile internet connections."

So, at least I know it's not just me. I don't know about the internet connection angle, as my connection SHOULD be pretty damn solid... but at least it helped someone and I didn't write this stuff out for nuthin.

Was also plagued by this issue, Bought Dimmdrive and run all of tf2 off of a ramdisk. Basically solved all stutter, freezing problems.

I was getting 1-minute-freezes since I formatted my PC (last tuesday) and I just figured out it was freezing everytime I used my mic in game. The key I used to activate it was alt, so every time I alt+tabed my game it was freezing.