Turning off images would help a bit if they're being served from the same systems the HTML is (at least icons). One idea would be to have one system dedicated to images (with as few as are on the forums, you could probably have all of them cached in RAM, even with just 128 or 256MB). Just point all IMG SRC references to images.anandtech.com. (Slashdot used to do this for the longest time, and it was quite effective).
Another idea may be that if the load average is too high, put a cap on the maximum posts displayed at once (for example I set mine to 50, just the way I prefer to read, but that's gotta put a nice load on the database for one page view). Or, if the SQL backend is fine but it's the parsing engine on the web servers causing the problems, you may actually want to turn that number UP (it all depends on the cost per page compared to cost per SQL query, and a bunch of other variables. You know the drill 🙂). Finding a balance depending on where the bottleneck is, and so on.
-edit- Another idea may be to make image maps instead of using individual images for the different menubars (the icons showing ICQ status and such, from what I can tell all but the ICQ and profile links are pretty static, but profile and ICQ could be seperate images). Should save a few hits per page view on the servers.
