My laptop was making noises under load, and sadly trayfreq was unable to set cpu frequency for some reason. I poked around /sys and found intel_pstate driver can be configured this way:

echo 25 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/max_perf_pct

this sets max frequency to 800 mhz instead of 2.5/3.0 ghz as usual.

note that 25 is percentage, and on different core iXXX processors results can be different.

inxi                                                                 
CPU: dual core Intel Core i5-2450M (-MT MCP-) speed/min/max: 798/800/3100 MHz                      Kernel: 5.6.14-x64 x86_64 Up: 27d 14m 
Mem: 2453.5/5887.8 MiB (41.7%)                               Storage: 610.63 GiB (76.4% used) Procs: 227 Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.12

I hope this might help Phyllis with her overheating intel laptop .....