Which Has The Best Performance?

This:

SELECT MAX(TheDate) FROM MyTable

or this:

SELECT TOP 1 TheDate FROM MyTable ORDER BY TheDate DESC


As a follow up question to save me having to post, if I want a different
field from the result set of a MAX query, how do I do it? ie. I want the
"Condition" field of the record with the most recent date. I have been
doing it like this:

SELECT TOP 1 Condition FROM MyTable ORDER BY TheDate DESC

but if MAX(TheDate) is quicker, I would like to SELECT TOP 1 Condition ....
where TheDate is the max date...... Hope this makes sense.....

Basically, I'm going to be performing this query nested inside another query
and I want the maximum performance possible (indexes are a different
question), which means trying to avoid table scans....