GameSpot certainly has a penchant for those benchmarking tests. The GameSpot staff managed to get their hands on Sony's PSP Slim and put it through its paces in a set of loading time tests against the original PSP. The results of the test show that while the original PSP loads stuff pretty quickly, the PSP Slim manages to do it much faster in almost all of its tests.

According to GameSpot, the staffers enabled the "UMD Cache Option" in the system settings menu. This feature is supposed to speed up the load times of games by reducing the frequency in which the PSP picks up information from the UMD. They then tested three games (Pro Evolution Soccer 2007, Test Drive Unlimited, and WWE! SmackDown vs. RAW 2007) by checking their initial launch times on the two units, as well as the "subsequent level reloads" for each of the three games.

The results? Well, load times were generally faster for the PSP Slim on both the initial launch tests and the level reload tests, with the Slim being faster by anywhere from two seconds to 37 seconds. On the other hand, in the one instance where the PSP managed to be faster than the Slim, it was only by one second.

Granted, these load times still are still pretty high (106 seconds is still a long load process for a PSP Slim level reset), but for gamers looking for every bit of speed they can get for their games, the PSP Slim certainly looks to be something worth grabbing. Of course, there are other considerations that need to be looked at, and GameSpot also took a look at some of those in their full coverage, which you can check out through the Read URL. Bottom line though: The PSP Slim is quite an upgrade from the original in a lot of ways.