Laptop GPU flawed design. Any way to force disable the offboard GPU in Windows?

[Vinicius.M]

TD;DR - The "high-performance-purpose" GPU gives a BREATHTAKING whooping average increase of 3% (three) in performance over the Integrated GPU, whilst consuming ~4x more energy/battery.
(And keep in mind I'm using the integrated GPU on single-channel memory, it would be definitely¹ faster than the dedicated one using dual channel. )

I already have the setting "Switchable Dynamic Graphics" to "Force Power Saving Graphics". (under "Advanced Power Options Settings")
However there still seem to be times where something triggers the discrete GPU and somewhat increase power usage.
I know there's a way to disable it in Linux, because I've found a way when researching, over an year ago.
I did gave up on finding anything on Windows though. However, lurking through this forum, I've figured maybe some of the fine users here could know something more about it.

 

Long Story Short: Bought a Lenovo ThinkPad E460 (the humble cousin at the rich ThinkPad familiy).
Even when I hadn't bought it yet, I was already questioning the design decision of putting an R7 M360 inside.. I checked fps in game for that GPU and it seemed to be around even with the HD 520.
In some games the M360 wins;
While in others the HD 520 takes the lead.
In any case the difference is basically negligible anyway.
They never even get past 8% difference.
 

Bought it anyway because I wanted a laptop with a trackpoint (red-thing-mouse) and that was the best my money could buy. (Also my options were greatly limited for not being a resident of neither the US or EU.)

After buying it, performed my own tests in some games, some stress tools, and some benchmarks.
My suspicions proved true and the discrete GPU is almost² useless.
 

On top of that, the AMD GPU is wayyy more inefficient (power-hungry), as usual. Although AMD does give a run for the money, their products often use more energy to achieve the same work, when compared to competitors - Intel for CPUs or Nvidia for GPUs.

Measured power draw of both GPUs under load and the AMD one seems to draw at least 4X more energy, while producing those 3% increased results.

That's hardly any surprise, considering the M360's lithography of 28 nm, versus the HD 520's 14 nm.
 

So, conclusions: Lenovo engineers thought it was a good idea to spend more money buying and adding a discrete GPU unit, fit it inside the laptop case, provide a cooling design, etc etc etc, in order to provide about the same processing power as the integrated GPU the laptop would already have, but now spending much more energy, generating more heat, and depleting your battery faster

I sincerely don't know how those guys get to do these things and still keep their jobs.

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1 - If you search around, you'll easily find reports of people getting around 40% framerate increase on iGPUs when using dual-channel over single-channel.

2 - It's not entirely useless. 
It has 2GB memory, and maybe in some specific scenario that would make you better off.
Also it doesn't share the TDP with the processor like the iGPU. Depending on the game or scenario, that TDP sharing can give the users some reduced performance due to the gpu or cpu throttling down in order to keep within TDP constraints. It's less of a problem for users willing to undervolt &\or increase the TDP using intel XTU, but maybe it would affect some layman users in some specific situations.

[tomoki]

I had this problem with my old laptop like 7 or 8 years back with Nvidia Optimus tech first coming out. I went into Device manager and simply disabled my discrete graphics card to save battery while mobile. 

[Vinicius.M]

Just now, tomoki said:

I had this problem with my old laptop like 7 or 8 years back with Nvidia Optimus tech first coming out. I went into Device manager and simply disabled my discrete graphics card to save battery while mobile. 

Thanks for the ideia, but no luck with that one.
I forgot to add that to the OP - I've already tried that. 

I don't know if it's an AMD thing, or something about Windows 10, but apparently nowadays that just makes it worse.

When I disable the GPU in the device manager, it's like it goes somewhat out-of-control since there's no driver there anymore, and it keeps itself on all the time.
It's never gets any workload, so it's not a huge draw like it'd be If I were using it, but it's like it doesn't use the "sleep power state" (let's call it),  and instead it stays on the other lowest P-state possible, some very low clock speed, but which draws considerable power.

The setting "Switchable Dynamic Graphics" to "Force Power Saving Graphics" works reasonably well.
For most of the time, it's like the GPU is not even there.
Just sometimes something triggers it and there's some extra power draw.
I can live with it, but just in case there's some dll or registry hack I don't know about and somebody here does.... =)

Thank you nevertheless.

[deXxterlab97]

Disable in BIOS?