Problem with AMD 7970m driver/update

After literally battling with my m17xr4 for four days, I have managed to get everything back in order with a clean install of windows 8 (not 8.1).

This is all the result of a fluke graphics (I'm assuming graphics) crash while using the laptop last week. I crashed to black screen and couldn't reload windows. After making lots of changes, I think I'm good other than the GPU.

During one of my reformats, I chose in the BIOS to reset factory settings. Now when I see my video cards, I see Ivy Bridge for my integrated graphics and ATI GFX for my discrete. Before when everything was working for the past year or so, I would always see the Intel 4000 card and the AMD 7970m cards listed. Now the Intel 4000 seems to be working normally, as I've updated the driver and everything seems in order.

I can switch between the two via FN+F7, but in either mode, the device manager shows the AMD card not working properly. I either see the Code saying that there is a problem with the device (I think code 43) or currently, code 10 (the device cannot start).

I have tried first off from the Dell Website to download the driver specifically for my service tag, along with the proper OS, but the graphics crash during download.

I have also tried the drivers straight from windows update independently (WMDD1.2 -- this is also supposedly the driver on my faulty device) and this also results in a graphics crash to black screen.

I've removed both of those drivers with restore points and proceeded with drivers from AMD, which also yield a crash. I've tried repairing the driver, disabling the driver, and deleting the driver.

I now have a safe place to restore to before messing with the drivers, everything else seems legit. I haven't tried updating to windows 8.1 because I kept running into problems, perhaps from this driver issue. I'm not currently on a fast internet connection so I'll probably wait until I'm home again to try the 2-3 gb download for 8.1

Perhaps the card itself is damaged? The computer is definitely still reading the device so I'm thinking that perhaps something is lingering from a past driver or possibly a compatibility issue or setting that I'm missing. The BIOS diagnostic doesn't show video card problems, but I cannot be certain that it is checking the discrete and not the integrated card only.

Any advice would be appreciated. My laptop is out of warranty so I haven't called tech support, I think it would be cheaper to just buy another laptop/GPU before paying for support. The laptop was running fine on win8.1 a week prior for about a year.

Thanks for reading.