High resource utilization and I need advise

Here is my scenario, but before that, I’ve read for a month about how to optimize wordpress, php, mysql, apache, etc added to my knowledge in mysql and php.

The site gets around 720+ thousand pageviews every month nd the CPU and memory usage is unstoppable
I have the site hosted on a level 6 VPS with hostgator, 2CPU 3.4Ghz, 2304Mb RAM and enough storage and transfer bandwidth. It uses the LeetPress theme in its latest and greatest version.

Also with that, my site uses W3TC and I can see it working, I have tried different settings and recommendations, nothing seems to help and also I use cloudflare as a CDN and before uploading pictures they get optimized with Smush.it. My problem is that I still see a very high resource utilization, it doesn’t matter what I do, from level 3 to level 6 the resources haven’t seen any rest at all. I have recompiled apache with xcache, eaccelerator, apc, used fcgi,suphp, I have increased and decreased the settings in mysql and apache, nothing helps.

I have read around these forums and others of some sites that have way more visits and hits every day and are in a shared hosting, I haven’t tweaked anything code-wise inside wordpress or the template, I have reduced all the plugins to just use one that came with the theme, widgets are the same 1 that came with the theme and the rest are plain html or javascripts, like adsense or facebook scripts. I have checked queries and makes no sense that one time I load the page and get 35 queries, 2 minutes later, same page, same content gives me 200 queries

What else can be done? how can I optimize wordpress to use less resources and let me keep growing my site? how is it that other sites have more visits than me and are in a shared hosting? is it 700+K pageviews a month a reason for a dedicated server??

I will appreciate any advise, settings for php,mysql,wordpress, apache or anything, anything you can do to point me to the right direction