I've run through the gamut on socket-478 processors, but I started with the 2.4C -- a Northwood.
It may be the case -- as someone above said -- that the 1MB L2 cache of the Prescott is "slower" -- but in my opinion, the Prescott is more "scalable" than the Northwood if over-clocked. The caveat is that much of the OC'ing has to come from the front-side bus, and the entire combination benefits from very "elastic" memory that can be pushed toward DDR500 with the lowest latencies possible.
Again IMHO -- with fast memory, the L2 cache on an over-clocked Prescott would provide an edge.
I also feel as though I broke the myth about Prescott temperatures. It is not really a myth -- my Prescott 3.2E and 3.4E both have peak thermal power of above 103W at stock settings. But I used a ThermalRight SI-120 cooler and ducted the motherboard. Generally, on a day with 75F+ room ambients, the load temperature on the Prescott peaks out at 43C or around 110F. This is much lower than what some have reported in midtower cases and less thought toward efficient and effective cooling. Also, I used a ThermalRight heatpipe cooler on the Northbridge.
My mobo is the P4P800 SE -- the Springdale counterpart to your i875 Canterwood P4C800. I only heard that the voltage regulators of the P4C800 are better than those of the P4P800, but the family now has two of the P4P800's -- one running a Northwood 3.0C at 3.6Ghz and DDR480 -- the other with a Prescott over-clocked 10% from 3.4 to 3.7Ghz. In the the Prescott system, I used OCZ Platinum EL DDR400 revision 1 dual channel kit -- 1GB. I can over-clock the FSB to 872 Mhz easily with VCORE set under the Intel spec, the VDIMM at rock-bottom of 2.6V for the Platinums. The Platinums will scale stablely to above DDR450 by bumping up the VDIMM to 2.75V and latencies around 2, 3, 2, 6 -- and will go up to DDR500 with looser latencies.
HEre's the kicker -- the Platinums will maintain the stock latencies of 2,3,2,5 up to around DDR440 and VDIMM of 2.6 or 2.65V. At the peak setting with those latencies, the memory bandwidth leaves behind a pair of Platinum XTC DDR500 modules at 3,3,3,8 -- with the FSB clocked to provide DDR500.
I previously had the system OC'd with a 3.2E processor to only 3.5Ghz but at an FSB of 1000 and the memory (of course) at DDR500 -- the XTC modules. That -- too -was fast, but the memory bandwidth didn't compare to the Platinum DDR400's at the speed I mentioned.
Personally, I agree that the Northwood over-clocks well, but I'm convinced that with some over-clocking, the right memory and the right cooling, the Prescott's double-sized cache is an advantage.
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