Oddly, something about gridania always gives me the worst FPS there. Character models don't make much of a differeance in gpu load, if any at all, just hdd, but since giving ffxiv a dedicated ssd that problem has gone away. I don't want to cap 60fps, I want to be int he 40's and 50's, meaning that i'm hitting some limitation, however it's never been close to being the cpu, always the gpu or hdd.

Also, you have only ffxiv running, i have ffxiv with higher settings, higher resolution, 3 monitors, a million chrome tabs, video playback, excel, and a dozen other things, and yet my cpu usage is lower than yours... And I don't overclock anything. Hmm...