It seems the dual TOP/ORDER BY was the most efficient approach by the time.

I tested the new Denali OFFSET/FETCH and I got the exact same number of reads for @StartRow = 5000, but 2 ms instead of 4 ms.

SELECTNumber

FROMdbo.TallyNumbers

ORDER BYNumber

OFFSET@StartRow - 1 ROWS

FETCH NEXT50 ROWS ONLY