Anand himself came to the conclusion that the Prescotts really don't pay off until you hit clock speeds of 3.6GHz and beyond. This is primarily due to the much longer instruction pipeline in the Prescotts as compared to the Northwoods. They need that much sheer clock speed to overcome the inherent probs of the longer pipelines.
These kinds of questions are hard to answer definitively though, as it kind of depends on what software you're running. Apps that respond better to shorter pipelines would run faster on a 2.8C than a 3.0E, I believe. IIRC, the branch prediction error rates are lower on some (or all?) of the Prescotts than the Northwoods, however, so there is some gain there on Prescotts' behalf.
Prescotts also run hotter than Northwoods, so keep that in mind as well. I don't overclock myself, so I can't speak to that and will defer to the other guys for their thoughts on that.
Here is Anand's article on this subject for anyone who'd like a more in-depth explanation of what I stated above. It's long, but a very good read.
