Any other ways to speed up minecraft besides playing with the settings and optifine?

It's possible. If your RAM is full, it has to do memory swaps with content in the memory that isn't being used to the hard drive to make room into active memory. This is processor and hard drive consuming.

Since Minecraft is a processor-heavy game, anything else that is processor-heavy will affect it.

Try rebooting your system before playing Minecraft to see if that helps playing it with nothing besides the OS in memory. Check Task Manager to see how much physical memory you have free, and which applications are using up most of your memory to see if it may have a memory leak (or at least shut it down until you're done playing Minecraft).

If none of that helps, then you may have something else wrong, but hard to tell without more info.

You're RAM just doesn't get full in the same way as your harddrive. If your RAM is being used too much, close down background applications to free up some.