Accurate histopathological image classification plays a crucial role in cancer detection and diagnosis. In automated cancer detection methods, extraction of histological features of malignant and benign tissues is a challenging task. This paper presents a modified approach on octave convolution to extract high and low-frequency features which help to provide a comprehensive representation of histopathological images. Proposed octave convolution model is used to perform histopathological image classification using three different optimization strategies. Firstly, an optimal alpha value of 0.5 is used to give equal importance to both high-frequency and low-frequency feature maps. This balanced approach ensures that the model effectively considers critical high-frequency features as well as low-frequency features of cancerous tissues. Secondly, high-frequency and low-frequency feature maps are extracted and down sampled into half the spatial dimension size to reduce the computational cost compared to standard CNN. Thirdly, training and validation was conducted using ReLU, PReLU, LeakyReLU, ELU, GELU and Swish activation functions. From the experiment, it was concluded that PReLU is the best activation function for capturing intricate patterns inherent in cancer-related histopathological images. Combining all these optimization strategies, the proposed method proved to provide a classification accuracy of 93% and also to reduce the computational cost by 50%. Performance validation against pre-trained models, CNN variants and vision transformer-based models has also been conducted, which proved superior performance of the proposed model.