[jandrese]

Probably an Optimus setup on the Windows side. It basically powers down the graphics card most of the time and switches to the lighter Intel graphics instead. Linux support for Optimus is poor and usually you end up having to choose either good battery life or good gaming performance.

[eloff]

This is likely it as the AMD CPU has a built-in low power Radeon GPU, and there's a monster Nvidia card for gaming.

Do you know how I can check if the discrete card is being used / drawing power?

[matheusmoreira]

I don't know about AMD but nvidia cards have a management interface that provides useful data like temperatures, load and wattage. AMD should have something similar.

I wrote a script to query that data and output it in a format compatible with i3status. In case you'd like to see how it works:

https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/~/.loca...

Please share the changes if you figure out an AMD solution. I'm curious.

[pxc]

I'm pretty sure Intel `powertop` can tell you, but if it can't tell you directly you can measure the difference in power consumption depending on whether the dGPU is enabled in the BIOS.