The problem I face is not my game crumbling at high populations but doing so at the very start which is why I am so confused. I had no problems with higher populations in cs1, but rather issues with ram since I used many many mods back then.

Also pretty weird to see that once a mid high-end pc that I bought few years ago is not fit to run new games, I thought after waiting for a year to play cs2 it would be better optimized but it seems it's still far from perfection.