So far I love my alienware laptop. It is an m17xr4 and it has been running for about 2 hours. While playing games I noticed that I could not push max and no fans came on so I thought to investigate.
The device manager indicated that the 7970m had drivers and listed them as from ati. The disk that came with the machine ran a hardware/software scan and it shows the drivers installed are the drivers for the nvidia 675m. I disabled the intel 4000hd device and enabled it almost immediatly, I could not do a thing and a warning message was displayed letting me know that the 7970 had no drivers installed.
I am about to remove the nvidia drivers and instal the ati drivers.
Wow.

Hope you enjoy your rig. So far it looks like your impressed/suprised. =)

Well get the drivers from AMD and you should be good. As for why the wrong drives where/are on you computer that question left to Alienware.

A bit shocked as well. I mentioned to the rep who started my order for me that this was an issue that seemed to imact more than a few people and asked her to make sure that it did not happen to me.
The Nvidia driver are not installed but niether are the ati drivers.

That is kinda old to be truthful, you would think that have the drivers that you need be on your computer.

Yeah but no. Everything is fine now though. The fans are very quite and I dont notice much airflow unless I turn on the mat. I heard that the fans were very loud. Where can I check the fan rpm settings?

I was wrong, after the restart post-fn/f7 I had to go into the device manager and noticed that the yellow icon was on the gpu so I clicked on it and I was promted to restart again after the windows drivers installed.
Not tough to figure out but I shouldn't have to deal with that. I think the switchable gfx would've been nice but it is no big deal. Maybe if I enable the intel now that the ati drivers are properly installed it will work as it is supposed to. I will try that later and update.

Keep your intel drivers in there and turned on, and same with your AMD ones (if you have to, reinstall them using the resource DVD that came in your accessory box) on and your amd one is in. Use the utility (Switchable graphics) that came with it to change your game to high performance instead of not assigned or power saving. On High Performance, it used the AMD graphics card but otherwise on not assigned or power saving, it will use the on board intel.

Crazy, glad that you figured it out before you ended up frying the system.

Dell sent the wrong resource disk with my laptop. It has the drivers for nvidia, not amd
How could I have fried my system?

enjoy your rig! that sucks you should contact dell support
as for all the drivers you should have no problem in finding them on the internet, besides there is a pretty good chance the ones in the disk are not up to date

jnman, it sounds like you know your way around computers very well. Your input and help here will be great, I can see that already ^_^
Very sloppy of Dell to not send you the correct resource disk. YOU may have known what to do, but to an average user this would have been boggling, taking up hours of time with support to correct and extremely frustrating to get to the issue and fix it.