Light weight linux distros

[UnknownFallout]

What light weight distros does everyone recommend?

My T430 has i7-3820QM processor, heatsink upgrade, 16 gigs of ram. The device originally came with windows which ran fairly poor, so I installed Linux Mint Cinnamon, which was my first time using Linux. I think Linux is great but the distro is unresponsive and it takes a while to launch programs. I'm assuming the bottleneck for these older devices is most likely DDR3 ram because the installed CPU is pretty zippy still.

With that said I would like to hear what OS's you guys love. I only need to browse the web, launch steam, and rip CD's.