Nate

Welcome to the community.

You should be able to create profiles for your applications and select High Performance for them. The most current Dell drivers may be downloaded from the following link.  Are these the drivers that you used?  

www.dell.com/.../inspiron-15r-5520

If you did install these drivers I suggest uninstalling the drivers, look for AMD in programs and features and choose uninstall and once the drivers have been cleaned from the system download and install the Dell driver and go from there.

Please let me know what you find out.

TB

Hi Terry, I re-installed the Catalyst Control Center driver from the drivers disc which seems to have worked. If not I will report back. Thank you for the tip, much appreciated :)

Regards,

Nate

Thanks for the update, please let me know if the problem continues.

TB

Hi Terry, having re-installed the drivers seems to have solved the problem. I do have another question however. How can I set the Radeon HD 7670M that I've got to be used on websites such as systemrequirementslab.com that test my laptop's compatibility with games? It winds up testing the specs using the Intel HD4000 instead of the Radeon card, such as below:

Minimum: Intel® Core™2 Duo E6600 or AMD Phenom™ X3 8750 or better

You Have: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3612QM CPU @ 2.10GHz

PASS

 Click here for the latest CPU drivers.

RAM

Minimum: 2 GB

You Have: 8.1 GB

PASS

OS

Minimum: Windows® Vista / XP / 7

You Have: Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Edition Service Pack 1 (build 7601), 64-bit

PASS

 Click here for the latest Windows drivers.

Video Card

Minimum: Shader 3.0 or better 256MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600GT / ATI Radeon® X1950Pro or better

You Have: Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000

Upgrade Suggested: Unfortunately, your Video Card does not meet this requirement. Click here to see some recommendations.

 Click here for the latest Video drivers.

Features: Minimum attributes of your Video Card

Required You Have

Pixel Shader version 3.0 5.0

Vertex Shader version 3.0 5.0

Dedicated Video RAM 256 MB 1.0 GB

Free Disk Space

Minimum: 12 GB

You Have: 648.9 GB

PASS

I'd like to be able to do the benchmark/test using the Radeon chip. Another thing is, I've tried to fix it by putting Google Chrome into High performance mode in CCC, but this does not make a difference. I'm also having trouble with Fallout: New Vegas, where it detects the graphics as being the HD4000 chip only, which means I can only run the game on medium settings. Again, high performance mode in CCC doesn't solve it, and it's the same story for Skyrim.

Can I configure the default graphics in the BIOS, or will I screw my laptop up?

Regards,

Nate

Nate

That is a good question. On AMD Enduro Switchable Graphics Intel HD 4000 graphics is counted the primary GPU.  It was engineered this way so as to not cause delays when switching between the two GPUs, the integrated GPU runs all of the time and the discreet AMD GPU will only kick on when a program that has the profile of high performance is started.  The Intel HD 4000 GPU doesn't turn off even then, the discreet AMD card renders the graphics and sends the rendered graphics to Intel HD 4000 which sends the graphics to the program.

If you want to bench mark the system then you will need to find the executable of the benchmark program and create a switchable graphics profile and configure it for high performance.  Once you have done this run the benchmark.  For proper testing run the benchmark with both power saving and high performance settings and compare the deference.

Please let me know what you find out.

TB

Nate

That is an extremely good question, to my knowledge Intel HD 4000 will be the default GPU for IE at least, I am not familiar with an executable for IE.  I haven't looked but you may be able to find the executable for Chrome or Firefox or some other browser, and if you can do that, then you may be able to test using your benchmark.

Or you can try other benchmark utilities; I suggest the trial versions of 3D mark, or Heaven and go from there.

TB

Hey Terry, I've got another problem. I've upgraded to Windows 8 Pro and am having an issue with the catalyst driver compatibility. As you know, I've got a Radeon 7670M 1GB, and the driver refuses to work for Windows 8. Is there an update coming out any time soon to fix this? I tried re-installing the driver to no avail.

Thanks in advance.

Nate

Actually, disregard that, I fixed that issue by downloading the latest drivers from AMD. Thing is, when I upgraded to Windows 8 Pro when I press the button with the 2 gears it doesn't open up the mobility center as it used to. How can I fix that?

BUMP. I'm still looking for an answer here

No, there's no way to do that.  If you turn off the switching graphics, only the intel GPU will be used.

Hi,

I have an Inspiron 5520. Is there a way to turn switchable graphics completely off? I want it to run on dedicated graphics only. Catalyst Control Center now does not display and related options.

Lovely. but why?

That is the way the system is designed to work - the on-CPU graphics circuit handles all the video signal, even that processed by the AMD chip.  You cannot disable it.

@acsabir -

I would suggest if your interested behind the technology on how Discrete Video Cards work in current laptops depending on what Vendors Discrete Video card your unit has

Nvidia "Optimus Technology"   White Paper

AMD "Enduro Technology"   Blog Post

Cheers