neversaint,
Eimi Metamorphoumai has already done a great job of answering your question. I just wanted to try and make something clear as I made the poor mistake of assuming something would be obvious.

Using a water mark algorithm is the best way of finding a max/min value in an unsorted list. List::Util provides such an algorithm that uses a C implementation when and where possible. This isn't comparing apples and apples since both are in C. One is doing far less work (as was pointed out by Eimi Metamorphoumai). So unless you need the values sorted for some other reason later on, don't use sort for this.