I can say from personal experience, yes. The only con to this is graphics support. You might have lower than expected screen resolutions or incompatible/nonsupported drivers. You might also come across a certain requirement with the CPU for Windows 8, I can't think of it off the top of my head, but if the CPU spec isn't there, it's a no-go. It's a random thing, I think it's like PAE or some such. But seeing as the machines are both 64 bit, I bet that issue isn't there.
For overall performance, Windows 8 does real well with low system resource. I remember using a 32 bit Windows To Go drive on a similar machine and it ran real fine. Office, moderate IE browsing, and a couple other things; everything ran solid at about 300 MB of total use. Best of all, unlike with Windows 7, you can customize colors everywhere. With Windows 7 on said machine, it defaulted to a pasty blue color and awful graphics as the driver wasn't supported, but in 8, it's nicer to look at. Also, I natively installed Windows 8 on another xp era machine, works fine except for the Intel graphics chip won't ever have an updated driver, so it's just passible screen resolution for Windows 8 versus a working driver in 7 that 8 doesn't like. Overall between the two machines, it was like a breath of fresh air. It definitely puts another five years of use in old xp machines.