Ex-gentoo user here. In one of my ancient laptops, amd64 from 2006 maybe, the default kernel that came with the bootstrap Gentoo did not handle well throttling CPU speed. It was always by default to the maximum available and, thus, after some time the laptop would switch off itself because of excess heat.

The only solution I found was to compile another kernel with the correct extensions loaded and put a big fan under the laptop during that process.

Anyway, the situation was really funny for my coworkers but I learnt a lot of things thanks to Gentoo.