AMD 7970M / Alienware M17x R4 behaving oddly

[Omenien]

I've previously posted about this on another forum but have yet to find a solution for it. Essentially, my system is getting extremely awful performance in just about every game. For example, Batman Arkham City running at all of the lowest settings using DX9 has an average framerate of 30 FPS in the benchmark. I have similar issues in World of Warcraft where I'm lucky to have 60 FPS running the lowest settings, no addons, and standing in the middle of nowhere with nothing happening. I realize that the system is getting old but this seems to be unacceptable.

I've tried the following:

1. Clean installing Windows 8 and only installing the necessities (Drivers as well as AMD's Catalyst suite) Result: No quantifiable change.
   
2. Multiple clean driver installs (Such as Dell's provided drivers, AMD's most recent beta, the drivers provided on my system disc) Result: No quantifiable change.
   
3. Using Fn+F7 to change from Switchable Graphics to Dedicated Only. Result: The system restarts but when it turns back on it restarts again after about a second of being powered on. Once the system has booted after the restart, it is still in Switchable Graphics mode.
   
4. Using the unlocked A11 BIOS to force the Dedicated Card to be used. Result: After changing the primary display mode to PEG and disabling the integrated graphics, my computer would no longer POST. To solve this, I had to pull out the CMOS battery and clear the BIOS. I attempted this multiple times to the same result.
   
5. Enabling the old style switching by changing the power switching scheme to Full and Fixed dGPU power dynamic scheme. Result: AMD Catalyst Control Center was no longer functional and Windows only listed a "Basic Render Device" in any GPU selection prompts. I had to resolve this by changing the power switching scheme back and doing a clean driver install.
   
6. Flashing an undervolted VBIOS just to eliminate the VBIOS as being an issue
   

GPU-Z:

If you need any additional information, feel free to ask. I'd honestly be willing to try almost anything at this point.