I have tried the 17 Core version, the ram consumption after a cold boot is around 1.5gb while in the Lite version it's 600mb-700mb. Gnome uses more resources Older device with low system specifications and with a HDD will suffer a lot due to this. 1.5gb may not sound like a lot to you but it is for me. I will not recommend Core for older devices unless they have their HDD replaced with an SSD.