I remember that gentoo site. At one point I installed gentoo precisely because there was a seemingly huge difference in Pentium 3 code vs i386 that every other distro seemed to be tuned for. Also cutting out bloat seemed to relieve ram pressure and load times. I ditched it when the very first ubuntu release came out and it just worked and felt as fast. I then questioned my wasted hours doing miserable computer work that I took no joy in. I think I was running amd by then (possibly 64-bit?)