How come I'm unable to maintain 132 fps (occasional drops to ~100) but my GPU never goes over 60% load and and my CPU never goes over 50% load. Temps are fine. I use Chris' high frames cfg.

Above normal. Have also done the affinity thing where hl2.exe is the only process that has access to core 0.

Try Dota 2.

Wait, that's going to have the same problems as TF2 eventually. Not to mention they're two different games

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1093560
This was the biggest offender back when I got FPS drops. Might work for you. :?

Nah, I've already done that. Thanks though.

What are some of the fixes you already tried to do?

I assume you have a quad core CPU? 50% usage is normal in that case because TF2 doesn't touch more than 2 cores. If you have a dual core, it's not properly using multicore rendering and you should play around with that option in TF2.

Yeah, but even the cores that are loaded only chill at like 60-70% usage, so my CPU shouldn't be bottlenecking?

What I've done

Chris' high frames config (1680x1050 windowed mode)
surfaceproperties.txt mod
excluded hl2 and steam processes from my AV
excluded steam folders from my AV
given hl2 and steam exclusive use of core 0
hl2 and steam are above normal priority
aero and all that crap is turned off

specs

i7 2820QM
8GB 1600Mhz DDR3
GT 540M oc'ed to 800/950
Always play in High Performance mode, and temps are fine

change windowed to fullscreen, more fps that way

I read that somewhere and tried it. Negligible difference in minimum and average FPS so I went back to windowed for the easy alt tabbing.