If you're using Linux, I'd advise you to use a fast terminal like Terminology; it even has GPU acceleration, but I doubt you'd need that. The only one that comes close on CPU-rendering speed is urxvt.
Why would I use that instead of rxvt ?
i=0;while true; do echo $i;i=$((i+1));done
(tyls is ls with thumbnails, and tycat is like cat except that if you try and cat a movie file to stdout it will display a video player instead of raw bytes)
Of course if you're in difference circumstances the answer changes. But there's no particular virtue in using a worse terminal so that more of your RAM sits there with lots of 0s in it.
Egad, that pulls in a lot of dependencies! But yeah, it's blazingly, impressively fast.
Check out st[1] sometime. It's not as fast as either terminology or rxvt, but it's fast enough.
Ever accidentally cated a 4TB disc? It's… fun.