I was used to my Windows machine at home which has Core i7 and 16GB RAM, so when I once forgot my laptop and needed a workstation at work, I had to get anything I could get to reach server by RDP. I have found old AMD64 Athlon 3000+ and 2 GB of ram for it. I also had a FreeBSD 8.2 installation CD which was damaged and could boot but could not read kernel.tgz and base.tgs. So I made it install from the internet and thet I freebsd-update'ed it to 10.1. I installed pkgng, xorg, lxpanel, slim, openbox and rdesktop. So I had a working computer made from garbage in about 25 minutes, which could access Windows Server 2008 via rdp, problem was solved. Then I wanted to browse the internet, I installed Google Chromium and, as expected, it worked slower than on my Windows PC at home, but I replaced motherboard with Athlon 3000+ with another found board with Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU E5700 @ 3.00GHz. It had diferent RAM type, and now I have only 1,5 GB of it. Can't say how surprised I was when this machine started working just like my home PC, browser doesn't swap anything, works like a charm. I can't say I am having any kind of performance issues, this machine still suffice my needs. So yes, FreeBSD with only important stuff installed works fast as hell.