I have an Asus EeeBox at home (Atom N270, 1GB RAM), and besides the hard disk vs. MicroSD card, I think my Pi3 is faster than that. (If one includes the GPU in

I have an Asus EeeBox at home (Atom N270, 1GB RAM), and besides the hard disk vs. MicroSD card, I think my Pi3 is faster than that. (If one includes the GPU in the calculation, it definitely is - with omxplayer, the Pi3 can play 1080p smoothly, while the EeeBox only gets about 5fps on 720p...) The hybrid old-school machine you propose sounds interesting, though. ;-)