One of the new features that have been getting a lot of discussion that comes as part of the New Xbox Experience is the ability to install games to the Xbox 360 hard drive. It comes as a bit of a surprise that testing is starting to show that many games just don’t benefit from using this option.

In many cases the fact that the Xbox 360 title was designed to use the DVD drive makes installing it to the hard drive actually reduce performance. While this is not true in every case it seems that big titles such as Halo 3 use the Xbox 360 utility partition on the hard drive to improve performance by caching data on this utility partition, making installing the game to the hard drive actually degrade performance.

In our informal testing in the past 24 hours or so, our results were mixed. Several titles that we tried did seem to have a very slight real improvement in performance that was noticeable by loading them on the hard drive, but in most cases the load times were about the same.

Still, the option does offer one very positive benefit, which is that you don’t have to listen to the DVD-ROM drive continue to spin during game play. Noise is one area where the hard drive loading option wins hands down.

It might also save some wear and tear on your DVD-ROM drive as a by product by loading the game on the hard drive, but just don’t expect miracles as far as load time improvements go. We just suspect that the majority of titles have already been heavily optimized for play using the DVD-ROM drive and the majority of the current release titles will lack a noticeable benefit.