Radeon 8870m

yes i can install the drivers and use it with no problems - if you use your laptop as a desktop, this will be fine, but keep in mind that closing the lid can sometimes lead to the driver crashing, and you without any choice but to force restart.

heat from the laptop is fine, i'm using mine for about 3 months now, and the heat output is about the same as when it was new. I have to say that when compared to my older (by 3 years) laptop, heat output overall is much less, and even when gaming for long stretches, its also less - you can really feel the fan on the side push the air through.

trackpad is normal, but the mouse buttons are NOISY, like DAMN NOISY - i really wouldn't recommend gaming on the trackpad anyway - use a mouse. The loudness of the noise is very irregular and dependent on your luck tho, i've tested many Dells with the same shell as this 3537 i have now, and the loudness of the mouse button clicks vary by a lot, but the 90% of them i would say are waaaayyyy too loud for what a laptop should have (think lecture hall, board room meeting use).

having said that, if all you want is a fairly portable, no-nonsense spec monster (for the price), Dell (+amd graphics) is your machine.

Do you ever have any problems with the keyboard repeating characters with a single press, I have this fault on both my xps and my inspiron 17 which were the same generation (sandybridge) and I wondered whether this fault persisted or whether they resolved it.

never knew such a problem existed, so nope

Hi! Now i just tried that driver but experienced the same probs (hybernating and sleep mode not working).

So i have decided to use the DELL driver rather.I just need these functions :).

 Other way of thinking,Maybe we should  upgrade the intel HD 4400 driver somehow because maybe this causing the sleep and hybernating problems.I found a new driver at Intel but i could not install it :( My DELL not let it..

Back to the 8870m i dont think Dell will come out with an upgraded driver to it.Since AMD released the R9 series (like the R9 M270 is probably just a renamed 8870M),DELL wont care about this thing anymore.
I think we need to wait for an R9 M270 DELL laptop driver and  try that one.But now i just found this product with the R9:http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/y-series/y40/?cid=ww:social:54017293:FBPAGE:Lenovo:Products&linkId=8115812

I will try to download its driver from the Lenovo site... :)

I was reading the notebookcheck.com review of this laptop and it says:

The problems start when you stress the GPU at the same time, which results in a deactivated Turbo after a while. 1.8 GHz can lead to restrictions in some applications, which is also supported by our gaming benchmarks. Dell should put some work into this problem if they do not want to scare off gamers.

Does anyone know whether this has been addressed or not?

Thank you for the solution, but I am actually VERY angry at Dell for not making all its technicians aware of that problem AND solution.

I called tech support for that very problem (unable to go into sleep mode), and spent a long time on the phone with the technician, who performed a long series of tests and reinstalls, and finally decided to send a technician at my home to replace the hard drive.

The average user would have had to reinstall Windows from scratch from there, but I cloned the HDD before... just to see the problem was NOT the hard drive, so I searched the Web anew and finally found this thread (no thanks to Dell help or support!).

And then this simple process solved the problem... after days of useless (and costly!) fuss.

So, thank *you* Senthil, but shame on your lightheaded employer.

Would you please add this to the toubleshooting FAQ (or anything of the like) so that others can easily solve the driver problem from now on?
Two corrections, by the way:

1) Pressing F8 won't take you to Safe Mode in Windows 8. Five alternate ways are described at http://www.7tutorials.com/5-ways-boot-safe-mode-windows-8-windows-81.

2) To uninstall the drivers, you have to go under Graphic cards (not under Sound, video and game controller).

I've been waiting to see if I can get a deal on one of these machines, would you, therefore, avoid the machine altogether?  How hard can it be for AMD to design a driver to work appropriately with their own software and a major OS?

So, what's the situation?
I've been following this case from a distance. Tried to do what Roman-BV suggested to improve my video drivers and I really did get a huge improvement in-game considering the FPS...

BUT...

After that I couldn't turn off my PC, couldn't hibernate, etc. At total I must have already had done 15+ hard reboots on this 1 week old machine. Thank you so much Dell.

I've already reinstalled Windows 8 to factory settings, and I will not install no more unnofficial drivers. This is Dell's problem, and I hope she resolves it ASAP since it has been almost 6 MONTHS since the last driver releases for our graphics cards.

Please Dell representants, give us a honest reply in the next few days or I will be in my right to flood these forums with these complaints to show how ridiculous this situation is: owning a computer that has an awesome integrated graphics cards which only delivers 10% of its potential due to lousy drivers.

No more idle waiting, 6 months without an ETA for these new drivers or a formal excuse from Dell representants is ridiculous.

Hoping that we can solve this situation the best way possible for both sides,
Bruno de Oliveira

Can you not just download:

http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/latest-catalyst-windows-beta.aspx

I have a dell laptop with a 5650 card and I can download that one and it works.

  I couldn't get Dell to knock me 8% off of this machine so I left it and will look at another.

As far as I can see from different complaints on various forums, the problem applies to Inspiron 15, 15R, 17 and 17R. There might be others, but that is what I saw.

Since Dell's low-fi-tentative-and-not-very-public-so-called-solution works for the reactivation of the Sleep and Hibernate modes, and since I do not need the computer for gaming, I will not try your suggestion personally, but for disappointed gamers, that certainly deserves a shot!

Good morning gentlemen,

By no means I meant that  Inspiron 17R 5737 /w Radeon HD 8870M is a bad notebook. Although I'm mad with this situation, I still know that Dell is a competent enterprise and will get these drivers sorted out sooner or later... although i wouldn't prefer the latter.

So...
Do I recommend this notebook? Yes! For gaming also? Affirmative, I got some amazing FPS on high graphic settings... but then I couldn't switch off/hibernate my notebook so I switched back.

Moving onward to the last post...
I saw that it was released like 5 days ago this Catalyst 14.6 that you are talking about. I didn't install them for 2 reasons ( do consider that I'm a noob when it comes to switchable GPU's and notebook drivers and many of my presumptions may be false):

1 - Nothing guarantees that these AMD drivers will work since DELL's drivers are made with the Intel Graphics switchable stuff in mind ( that's why, from what I've gathered, most unnoficial drivers don't work). Although I'm aware that this last 14.6 beta is the first one to be compatible with Windows 8.1 for the Radeon HD 8000 series. I see a light in the end of the tunnel guys :) !!

2 - It's too much of a hassle to install unnofficial drivers. While I'm faaaaar away from being a pc expert, I'm well aware of the immense troubleshooting you have to do to make these drivers work. Installing driver, reverting driver, entering OS in safe mode, uninstalling driver, entering BIOS turning off safe boot, turning off WIndows Update (which completely turns me off cos, I like gettin updates), and last but not least you have gotta deactivate the User Account Control (UAC)... which is a mess to do in Windows 8... you gotta enter the registry, disable it, bla bla bla... and then you won't be able anymore to use Windows Store and ***...

Whew.. Seriously, I lost like 7 hours of my day looking into this. And I got nowhere. Unless somebody comes up with a miraculous solution that doesn't involve tinkering thousands of stuff in Windows 8 that might only work for 20-40% of the users suffering from this problem, I think it would be wiser to wait for a proper response/driver from Dell, no matter how long it takes. 

We can pressure them if you guys are up for it = ).

Did anyone tried the new amd 14.6 catalyst beta driver with the intel driver from dell?

Well, I don't think they updated the graphics driver on my old inspiron to this day and it's four years old!  At least you can now ue the catalyst drivers from AMD, originally you couldn't.  I think using the amd driver is your best option of keeping your gpu drivers up to date.