Fedora vs. CentOS for Limited Resource Machines

[Guest]

I've got some experience with Fedora and loved it, so I've decided to start throwing it on more of my machines. I would like to limit myself to .rpm based distros and the Gnome 3 interface to maintain as much commonality as possible. My question is regarding three laptops I have that are all running very low-end processors.
One has an AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 CPU with ATI Radeon HD 3200 GPU and 2GB DDR2; another an AMD E300 APU with 4GB DDR3; the last is a netbook with an Atom N2600 and 1GB DDR3.
I will mostly be browsing the web, but will also likely be using these same computers for schoolwork as I progress into my compsci major. While I would prefer to put Linux on all three, I am most concerned about performance on the Atom, given its RAM and CPU in conjunction with its form factor, making it the easiest to take with me but the most limited in its capabilities. Which OS will provide the best performance on such limited hardware?

 

[stillblue]

Can't imagine you'll have a problem with any of them. You generally don't have much an issue with the processor until you start getting into heavy graphics and that is not what you are talking about. I once had 10 thin clients running off an ubuntu server with 1 gb ram, all mainly using openoffice. This was 4 years ago that I set it up and the school is still using it. You'd be hard pressed to see a speed drop in any of the clients. Not a recommended setup for sure but it gives you the idea. Wouldn't want anybody rendering a video on it though.

 

[Guest]

Can't imagine you'll have a problem with any of them. You generally don't have much an issue with the processor until you start getting into heavy graphics and that is not what you are talking about. I once had 10 thin clients running off an ubuntu server with 1 gb ram, all mainly using openoffice. This was 4 years ago that I set it up and the school is still using it. You'd be hard pressed to see a speed drop in any of the clients. Not a recommended setup for sure but it gives you the idea. Wouldn't want anybody rendering a video on it though.

My primary concern in my standard use case is in regards to web browsing, especially as I tend to have several tabs open at once. This is something each of these machines (especially the Atom) already struggles very heavily with, so I am worried that simply switching over to a less resource intensive OS will not be sufficient to completely alleviate these issues.

For an example of my typical load on a computer, I currently have the following tabs open:
1) 1:30:00 YouTube video (SD)
2) Ars Technica article
3) Wikipedia page
4) Blog
5) Same blog (different post)
6) This forum
Additionally, I visit Facebook very often, and read a good number of webcomics, both of which have been able to individually strain these machines under Windows in the past.