It depends....
In the most common case re-rendering the whole page just to display a small change in some data in a table is probably a waste. So using JQuery would be quicker.
If you have php get all the data out of your database, then process all the data, then render all the html, then send the html to apache to server, AND THEN have JQuery turn on/off chucks of data for pagination, you are going to get the worst of both worlds.
A true Ajax solution would have php render the HTML structure layout once for the page. JQuery in the rendered page would make smaller requests back to php for smaller data sets. So php would still have to pull out only the requested range of data, format it, and package it up for transport back to JQuery, who would then alter the layout and display it.
The logic of pagination would still be in the php and JQuery would only need to know to request page X of data set Y.
You might even make the logic a tad smarter so JQuery asks for the visible data plus the next page. So if the user clicks next it will pop up quickly and smoothly.
In your case, if you data set is only a few hundred items then loading it all into a JavaScript array and having JQuery display small chucks of it doesn't seem that bad. It depends on how small/compressed you can make that data set.
