which is the best cache system for boost performance

there are about 1 thousand links on my front page, I am using link module and panel to building a links page. all links are organized by panel.

The problem I am having now which is the speed, everytime when user come to this page, it takes 5 second to load the page before it start to display something, even when I enable the page cache from performance, it still quite slow for the first time comer.

My understanding is drupal will have to load all the infor from database before it start to display something,

question:

is there any way or module which I can make the panel page to a html page ? then drupal won't necessary to load the database
Any module I can use to improve the speed ? I have check the module list , there are 3 of them I have found:

boost
Cache Router
fastpath_fscache

any suggestion ?