For me it's temperature=off, unless I plan on magmaing someone. Temperature is nice, but it eats up 20 FPS at least.
The gFPS gets lowered to 15. Lower values work too, but tend to give some problems with the game's reaction time and double key presses.
I usually have the print mode set to partial:2 and it works great. I heard that it's not the best for all systems, though.
With a bit of planning, traffic designations and lots of butchery, I can get about 80 FPS on a 3x3 embark with 130 dwarves and some moving water. I find anything over 100 FPS way too fast anyway, except for the very beginning when nothing interesting happens. Did you ever watch an epic battle between 30 dwarves and 100 gobbos at that speed? It's like 5 seconds of gore but you're not able to actually see anything.
That's on a 3GHz Dual Core with 3GB of RAM and freshly optimized system.
Shutting down all unnecessary programs that run in the background, helps a little, even if DF is restricted to its own core. Normally, there's stuff like antivirus, antispyware, firewall, several chat clients (skype, ICQ, and so on), internet browser (some need to be closed with the task manager to be completely dead), Windows update processes, music player, drivers for webcam, cellphone, printers, graphic tablets and so on. Most of these are not needed for DF and can be safely disabled while playing. Defragmenting your hard drive can also help a little. It doesn't do much for DF as a game, but optimizes the overall performance of your system, giving DF more resources to work with. I was very surprised, when I removed anything unnecessary from the system (and there's quite a lot of stuff after 3 years) and did a defrag... everything went way faster and DF is a pretty good benchmark for that. One particular fort went from 45 to 50-55 FPS.
And also what Mickey Blue said... lowering the max framerate makes it work much smoother. I hate it, when my dwarves jump from one end of the map to other in one second and then slow down to a crawl in the next, because I designated some stones to be dumped. It feels faster, when the framerate is the same all the time.