If your request is such that the results are cached on the file system, which your description may suggest, then the request is probably not a "heavy hit" in general. But if you tested in isolation, with little activity in the database, when SQL runs in a production environment, performance may suffer.
There are a few things you can do to determine which version of the two queries is better. In fact, entire books have been written specifically on this topic. But to summarize:
Before you begin, make sure the statistics for tables and indexes are up to date.
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