Is putting a column as first in clustered primary key the same as giving its own clustered index?

Question

Perfomance-wise, is it the same to query a table on a non-unique GUID in these two cases?

Case 1: Primary key on multiple columns while the significant column is the first item in the primary key

CREATE TABLE xyz (
    a uniqueidentifier NOT NULL,
    b uniqueidentifier NOT NULL,
    c uniqueidentifier NOT NULL,
    CONSTRAINT [PK_xyz] PRIMARY KEY (a, b, c) CLUSTERED
)

Case 2: Clustered non-unique index on the column I will use the most to query the table

CREATE TABLE xyz (
    a uniqueidentifier NOT NULL INDEX IX_xyz_a CLUSTERED,
    b uniqueidentifier NOT NULL,
    c uniqueidentifier NOT NULL,
    CONSTRAINT [PK_xyz] PRIMARY KEY (a, b, c)
)

Most of the time my table would be queries as SELECT ... FROM xyz WHERE a = ...

Answer 1

The SELECT will be very close in cost.

In both cases you'll seek through the BTree to the first row with that value for a, and scan the leaf level of the clustered index to find all the other rows for that value of a. In both cases all the rows for a value of a will be contiguous.

But case 2 will be larger and slower to update as it has two index structures instead of just one.