M11x Performance issues

Good morning, evening gentlemen.
Recently (About a month ago +/-) I purchased an Alienware M11x R2 Laptop from the Dell website, with specs as follows:

• 4 Gigs RAM
• 300 GB HD
• Core i7 CPU (max freq. 2.6)

I've been pretty happy so far with the setup, but I wanted to know if there was any possibility of squeezing any more power out of this rig for higher end games like Crysis. It started with a trip to this website, where I read countless posts on squeezing more power out of the little rig.
Point is, after trying a few techniques, it seems my rig has gotten slower than it was before. Before I made any modification attempts, I got a good show of FPS on Crysis, Borderlands, and Garry's Mod. I downloaded GTA4 to see how it ran, and at first, it ran it well (30-50 fps) but every so often it would lag spike really badly, (8-10 fps). I decided to investigate this, and found it to possibly be a CPU/GPU throttle issue. To correct this I downloaded ThrottleStop, and NVidia PowerMizer Manager. The lag spike did not go away, and as a matter of fact, now my Borderlands and Crysis installs run worse. The inconsistency of this rig is very very irritating.
The general consensus of this forum with the SpeedStep and Turbo capability is that it makes things slower. I disagree, saying with it off, I only get multipliers up to 10x (10x160, overclocked 'pu), but with it on, I get up to 17x. As well as helping me with my performance issues, could someone give me a relatively detailed explanation what Speedstep and Turbo really does? Here are a list of things I've already tried:

• Throttlestop
• NVidia PowerMizer Manager
• Nvidia Optimus Settings
• Antivirus Scan
• Antivirus off
• Defragment
• Game Booster
• TuneUp Utilites Turbo Mode and Clean
• All sorts of settings in bios
• Default bios settings
• Overclocking GPU
• Underclocking GPU
• Overclocking CPU
• Different game settings (lowest)
• MSI Afterburner
• Hoover Fan

I used to be able to run Crysis on low at at least 45 or so fps. Now its 20-30. I don't know.
Edit: Settings for throttlestop:
Set Mult: OFF
Disable Turbo: Off
TDP: 200
TDC: 200

(The CPU seems to be running at the right clock speed. I don't know why my games are lagging, but I guess its GPU related.)

 

I've also had strange performance reductions on my 4GB i7.

Oblivion seems to run worse than it did before. So does FNV and a few other games.

 

Currently installing Dell's graphics driver, to see if it helps.

 

Have you guys tried throttle stop? Most performance issues with the r2s are due to the I series throttling.

 

Major Tom: What CPU model do you have? You definitely want EIST enabled and to be using turbo boost. This feature increases the speed of your computer when unused cores are asleep and not being used. Hardly any software fully loads your CPU so this is a good feature to have on. Run a ThrottleStop log file while gaming as well as a GPU-Z log file. It's probably your GPU that is not running at full speed. Your log files will confirm this. Check what Force TDP/TDC is set to in the ThrottleStop Options window.