M17x R1 Power Fluctuations AC Battery Switching during Games

I have an M17x R1 with dual sli 260M cards and QX9300 processor. Probably the most buggy thing I have ever owned. I have currently installed 314.07 nvidia drivers on it but this doesn't seem to be necessarily related to the issue I am having....as I have tried the older official drivers too back from the heady days when Dell might have given a ****

Currently during any GPU intensive application I get irregular huge frame rate drops and sound problems where the screen darkens before it brightens back to normal and carries on i.e. when the power kicks back in again things return to normal. I have monitored the GPUs and they run 80-90'C which I am not unused to seeing during gaming but what I did notice is that during the battery switch the voltage over the GPUs drops from 1.0v to 0.9v. I believe this is the source of the problem, but my questions are as follows

1. What's going on? Has anyone seen this/dealt with this before?
2. Is there anything I can do to stop the AC/battery switching? or...
3. Can I somehow stop the gpu's voltage being dropped when I get off ac power?4. Is this related to nvidia "clever" power management control option...which I currently have switched on max performance at all times.
5.Is it something else.

Thanks for any input anyone can give me on this!