Upgrading to 3.0 or 3.2 GHz processors - is it worth it?

I'm looking at purchasing a Mac Pro, as I am in need of a solid, high performance desktop machine that can burn through large photo and video editing tasks. These include editing video (currently SD, soon to be HD) in Final Cut Express, encoding/transcoding video, authoring DVD's, and photo editing/retouching using Aperture and Photoshop. I am especially looking forward to seeing how the 8-cores affect my encoding/transcoding tasks.
I see the base configuration includes 2 x quad-core 2.8 GHz Xeon processors, and I have the option of moving up to dual quad-core 3.0 GHz processors for an additional $800, or to dual quad-core 3.2 GHz processors for an additional $1,600.
How much would I benefit from going from 2.8 GHz to 3.0 GHz? This seems to me to be a rather small jump (0.2 GHz per processor), and I am wondering if that is worth an extra $800. At the same time, I would like to "future proof" my machine as much as possible (i.e. to make it last as long as possible before having to buy a new one). I realize that this is not always possible but I would still like to try.
I suspect that the difference between 2.8 and 3.0 is a fairly small one. If it's something on the order of, say, a few extra seconds to a minute in an encode, then that is something that I can live with.
Thanks for your advice.

Hi dburr;
If you go Bare Feats, it will show you the differences.
Allan

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