Madden 12 Hard Drive Evaluation

With Madden NFL 12 in hand the first thing to check on was loading times when playing from the disc up against those when installed to the Xbox 360 hard drive. The data is accessed quicker when installed as the disc doesn’t need to be read and that accounts for the crisper loading. Madden 12 comes in half a gig smaller compared to last year but the loading times are longer. Still it doesn’t suffer in the way that the NCAA Football series does.

Install time- 7:36
Install size- 4.8 GB

Loading Times
Boot to main menu- 66 seconds disc vs 58 seconds HDD (8 seconds)
Load into Play Now- 33 seconds disc vs 21 seconds HDD (12 seconds)
Load out of game to Menu- 12 seconds disc vs 9 seconds HDD (3 seconds)
Load into Saved Franchise- 10 seconds disc vs 9 seconds HDD (1 seconds)
Load into Saved Superstar- 13 seconds disc vs 10 seconds HDD (3 second)
Load into Madden Moment- 44 seconds disc vs 25 seconds HDD (19 seconds)

Though not appearing terribly significant the time savings are noticeable. Installing to the hard drive is recommended for the reduced noise and wear and tear put on the system in addition to any improvements seen in loading times.