P170EM with 7970m crashes on DX11 games.

Hey guys, I really need your assistance with this issue as it is really bugging me and affecting my ability to fully enjoy my games. I have a P170EM with a 7970m and anytime that i play a DX10 or DX11 game it crashes within 5-10min of starting. If I play the game in DX9 mode it works perfectly for hours on end, the moment I play the game in DX11 mode, it will crash without fail. The screen just freezes and the sound begins to loop and I have to hard reset to get it working again. I've tried multiple ATI drivers including the latest official release and the beta. I've done the clean uninstall method (with driver cleaner/ driver fusion) before installing each driver. I've even tried using leshcatlabs bundled intel/AMD drivers and still no luck. Last night i updated my BIOS and EC to the latest version available following the instructions on this site, and still the problem has not been resolved. Any ideas on how to remedy this situation would be greatly appreciated in this matter,

Thank you in advance.

 

What kind of "crash" are you getting. Does it just turn off or do you get a BSOD?
If its just turning off you could be triggering thermal protect but not likely since you are playing for a long time in DX9. If getting BSOD get a Whocrashed to see exactly which drivers are causing it Resplendence Software - WhoCrashed, automatic crash dump analyzer

 

Its not a BSOD, basically the screen freezes, and then the sound begins to loop and the only way to get out of it is to hold the power button and restart my computer. A few times the same thing will occur and I will get a notification saying something along the lines of "the display driver has stopped responding and has recovered" and it will exit out of the game. I've been looking more into it and I think the main culprit are my temps in DX11 mode. I got MSI kombustor and my temps will reach 100 C. At that point i will just turn it off for fear of causing permanent damage to my card. Obviously these temperatures are insane. Its quite shocking how going from DX9 to DX11 makes my temps skyrocket so much. I searched a bit more on the forums and saw an easy mod someone posted up that requires "foiling" the heat sinks to increase its effectiveness and so Im trying to see where I can get some foil tape to try that, but being on a small island (St. Lucia) that may take a while. I was wondering, if I were to underclock my card, would that help with the overheating problems? I know i would lose some performance, but to be honest I just wanna play Bioshock Infinite, and I'll gladly take down some settings.

EDIT: Well, Im trying tomb raider again with DX11 enabled and im using MSI afterburner to check my temps while playing and now im even getting crashes when the GPU is only at 80c. Perhaps the OSD of GPU temps has a slow refresh time? so my GPU may have skyrocketed but my OSD GPU temp still shows the previous temp?

EDIT 2: Ok, now I bought the foil tape and did the modification, repasted the GPU and even adjusted the pressure on the heat sink to get optimal cooling and now on Kombustor with 95% GPU uitilization i hover around the low to mid 80s. So heat is no longer the problem yet DX11 refuses to work. Im at a loss as to what to do