ALIENWARE m17x r4 7970m Switching issue

[ZEQ2Mapper 11]

Hello, Im new here. How to I manually allow only the 7970m to be used and NOT the intel graphics 4000?

Even when pressing fn+f7 it disables everything, and no graphics card is on.

Am I suppose to update to the latest 13.3?

Can someone help me? Even battlefield 3 is messing up cause of this..

Thanks,

[AngieAndretti 19]

13.3 beta 3 is the best Catalyst driver as of now. They have a 13.5 beta but it's NOT as good on my system, like way worse, and buggy! I'd advise an update to 13.3 and if you use svl7's modified BIOS (available here) you can configure your video options right in the BIOS at startup. You'll find a place under Advanced -> Video where you can switch from [sG] meaning switchable graphics to [PEG] which is your 7970 card. I must say though that I don't understand you pressing Fn+F7 and it disables everything. Are you saying that when you do that it reboots and there's no video output at all? What do you do to recover?

[thop1544 12]

Use the modified A11 bios, go into video (under the second 'Advanced' category) and set video mode to PEG. Go under internal graphics device and set it to disabled. This will force the M17x R4 to always use the dGPU, something which is independent of the OS's driver stack.

[lonerMAC 10]

When I press FN+F7 with using UEFI and restart laptop, he restart it twice and switch back to optimus. When I use BIOS and disable UEFI boot then after FN+F7 my system start normally because I hear skype login sound, but I have black screen. With 660M was everything good, but afted upgrade to 680M I have black screen and no idea why.

[danger007 8]

Be aware that once you select one video device over the other you will lose the switchable (Eudoro, I don't know how the Optimus is affected, I tried to save $500 and got the 7970m instead of the 680m - big mistake).  From a post I made on the alienware arena site they said that I would have to go through the whole, switch gpu, reboot circle every time I wanted to use one GPU/iGPU over the other.  Now I know there was really no way to handle what AMD or Intel would run for games.  I tried a 3rd party set of drivers which seem to give me the ability with the Omega drivers, but it caused frequent crashes in games that did not recognize the switchable graphics, even when I set the game in the AMD CCC to run on AMD not intel.  Even worse, is that a week ago, the game locked the system, so I did a reboot but 1 week later I can't use my SSD or a clone to run the system as the boot manager/partition and hal.inf are so messed up.  I don't want to reinstall but I am looking as the only thing left (but enough about that).  The newer Crimson drivers supposedly put more control back into the AMD CCC (actually I think they renamed/revamped the CCC to something else - so just be aware) so I don't know if this could have been a choice for you (yes aware last post is march 2015, but if the original poster still subscribes/monitors this thread hope it can help further).