Anteara

That sucks, OP. One of my friends had this exact same problem. First thing first, this problem WON'T happen on Windows 7. We tested a dual boot of fresh installs, and his pc detected the gpu fine on 7 but not 8. Update your windows as much as you can, because this is a problem that reared its ugly head in the early days of Windows 8 release. I'm willing to be your computer contains an early RTM build, which appears to be one of the problems (since they're not updated as far as newer releases of the same build). If that doesn't work, disable optimus in your bios, and load safe mode with vga. This will force your laptop to use windows drivers on your nvidia card. Since it will now be recognized, you can go ahead and install the driver.

I'm not 100% sure, but I believe the rebranded cards use the same heatsinks.

A good program for the OP, and you, well anyone that experiences throttling when you have a temperature you're comfortable with: ThrottleStop.

Is it shutting down with the battery attached, or unattached? Also, under load or idle? If it's shutting down while idle, with the battery attached, which would rule out overheating, I would say it's probably your plug.

Hi Prema, thanks for this. You stated on the OP that you removed the links for the Win8 BIOS, are the zip's attached 7 or 8? Just wondering because my ge70 is windows 8 Thanks