Rotating a rigidbody is faster than changing the euler angle?

I have two different methods for rotating my characters, where direction is a float from 0-359:
When I use the method on the first line with 1500 characters all rotating I get speeds of around 700fps.
When I use the method on the second with 1500 characters all rotating I get speeds of around 60fps.
I tested this with multiple computers (three to be exact) all with vastly different...

Rotating a rigidbody is faster than changing the euler angle?