The Nintendo Switch is probably Nintendo’s most online-oriented console to date, with the company encouraging its customers to download digital versions of games over retail in the form of offering more My Nintendo points for those digital purchases. But one of the downsides of buying digital is having to wait hours to play the game, especially on a slow connection.
GameXplain wanted to test whether or not the Nintendo Switch downloads games faster when it’s put into sleep mode, so they devised a test to determine whether or not that’s true. Using the game Dragon Quest Heroes 1 and 2 from the Japanese eShop because it’s exactly 1GB in size, he determined that the Switch does download games faster in sleep mode.
Each mode was tested a total of four times and here’s a peek at the results:
| System ON times | System ASLEEP times |
| Test #1 – 9:05 | Test #1 – 9:00 |
| Test #2 – 11:20 | Test #2 – 9:40 |
| Test #3 – 10:51 | Test #3 – 8:45 |
| Test #4 – 9:45 | Test #4 – 8:00 |
| System ON average – 10:15 | System ASLEEP average – 8:51 |
All times listed in this table are in minutes, which means on average the Nintendo Switch is around a minute faster per GB you have to download when it’s awake than when you put it into Sleep Mode. That means for those future big downloads, you’ll definitely want to put your console into sleep mode to get them downloaded much quicker.
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