I'm getting these pauses fairly constantly every few seconds; I doubt it's related to my system since it has more than enough horsepower to run the game maxed out, except for PhysX which I keep off anyways.

I've tried running at all settings on low as well, and am getting the same issue. It's really annoying and ruins the game for me.

My system specs are:
Intel Core i5 3470 stock
16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 RAM
Corsair ForceGT 240GB SSD
Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 3GB
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, up-to-date with all patches

I'm running avast! antivirus in the background, along with the ZoneAlarm firewall and MSI Afterburner. Have tried disabling both avast! and ZoneAlarm,, and the Steam folder is in the global exclusions for avast!, but no luck.
All system drivers are up-to-date and my SSD is patched to the latest available firmware.
System temps are in the green (CPU\GPU is usually always under 40C\60C) and there's no dust clogging anything. The GPU usage in MSI Afterburner doesn't show any major spikes either; ditto for the CPU usage in the Task Manager.
Have tried the various .ini tweaks I found via some Googling, with no improvement whatsoever.

The game seems to be going to swapfile every few seconds; not sure why that'd happen since I have more than enough RAM available.

Any thoughts?