[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.