M17XR4 bios and 7970 driver questions

Good morning everone, I received my R4 yesterday and installed my SSD. Everything went great, then I did windows update and everything went great. I installed D3 and everything was good. Then after exiting D3 I tried the FNF7 and nothing would switch. I restarted my machine and tried FnF7 again, nothing. I tried uninstalling the drivers and running driver sweeper and re-installed the drivers, still doesn't work. What am I missing here? My motherboard BIOS is A02 not sure what video card bios is, how can I tell? GPU-Z won't work because I cannot get switched over to dedicated graphics and 3d mark advantage shows only the HD4000 graphics card. Any help is much appreciated.

 

Did you install the Alienware OSD application then?
Does device manager show both GPU's or only the HD4000?

 

Are you referring to the Command Center? Device manager shows both HD4000 and the 7970m with no problems, they both appear to be in, no "!".

Just looked in control panel and Alienware On-Screen Display is installed.

I just noticed too that NVIDIA PhysX is in the control panel too, that seems odd seeing how I don't have an NVIDIA card, should that be removed as well?

I think I have it resolved, I had to uninstall Alienware OSD and Alienware CC and re-install. Seems to be working ok now. Still cannot run GPU-z for some reason but no big deal I don't guess. Thanks for the help.

 

It might sound stupid, but worked for me. You have to install the video card driver while it's supposed to be in use. The first time you turn on your computer the graphic card is Intel Graphics HD 4000, so what you gotta do is:

1) FN + F7 and reboot
2) Once your computer has restarted probably the resolution of your screen will be all messed up. Just log in and adjust your screen resolution in the Control Panel.
3) Go to Dell's website and use your service tag to locate your computer and the drivers it should have.
4) Download and install the video card driver and once you have done that, reboot your computer again. Now you should be using you AMD video card the proper way, but if you are using Intel HD 4000 instead, just press Fn + F7 again and enjoy it!

Let me know if it worked! =]

 

If you read the post you will see that he was saying that Fn+F7 was not working.

 

It wasn't working for me either, it was always showing Intel Graphics HD 4000. I followed the steps and worked for me. At first I had to format everything to the factory settings with AlienRespawn and after that followed the steps.

 

Could you check in Catalyst if PowerPlay is enabled and set to High Performance?
Then try the switching again, though I don't think this has anything to do with it.
But it's at least something, Fn+F7 worked once so there has to be a problem somewhere with something.