In single thread performance the ancient core 2 is going to destroy the Atom, even at the same clock rate. The only thing good in the atom is the large core count [1] which makes up for the anemic single core performance, which is nice for small servers but pointless for desktops.

[1] from a performance point of view of course. It probably consumes significantly less.

"older" doesn't even begin to describe it, mind you. These are ten years old. A six year old Sandy Bridge (T420, X220 that series of ThinkPads) is going to wipe the floor with these Atom CPUs.

Depends on the application.

> This system runs Windows 10 fine

Do you have any tips on how? At work I have a brand new Dell Precision 5510 with Win10 that I had to upgrade to 32 GB RAM when using two full-HD external monitors (internal 4K display off) running Firefox and Autodesk Inventor, because on 16GB it would randomly crap out and bluescreen (with the new useless "sad smiley" type BSOD). Mind you, FF and Inventor were only using ~6GB RAM total.

Er... I can't help you for I have never used a computer with more than 4 GB. And I was running dual monitors in the days when 256MB was a very decent setup. You had to upgrade to 32 GB RAM?

I guess I should distinguish between when I had bluescreens, and when Win10 crashed the display manager saying "your system is low on memory". And only when running on dual monitors, never on the internal 4K display (which oddly enough has more total pixels). The "out of memory" errors led me to upgrade to 32 GB.

Bluescreen == unrecoverable kernel corruption == either bad drivers or failing hardware. If replacing the RAM fixed it, your old RAM was dead. Nothing to do with the capacity

I've seen it once even after upgrading, so it's not that the old RAM was dead. I'm guessing BIOS or driver issues as others have mentioned.

That really sounds like a hardware problem.

Do you have the Samsung NVMe driver installed? I had a similar issue on a fresh Windows 10 install that was solved by installing the driver directly from Samsung (the one for the 950 Pro works if I remember correctly).

I'll try that, thanks.

Make sure your drivers (and BIOS) are completely updated.. when I went to a GTX 1080 for a 4k display, I had a lot of weird issues... they all went away with a BIOS update of all things. Have to say, being able to trigger a BIOS update from a windows software was a weird experience... more scary when you come from having to create a dos boot disk with everything needed to update something.

Will try BIOS upgrade, thanks.

random question - do those older machines support a UEFI OS install?

I'm a bit wary from a security standpoint of going back to MBR.

UEFI's security benefits are dubious anyway unless you're using your own Secure Boot keys; else, you're likely relying on Microsoft's signing key.

No, they are too old to have UEFI at all.