Crashing issues with dual graphics

Have you switched to the Radeon GPU before starting ME3? The two GPUs won't work at the same time. The 6470m should be able to handle ME3 just fine.

Keep in mind that usually when running on battery the Intel GPU is selected.

I've tried switching to "high performance", in the radeon catalyst control center, if thats what you mean. For some reason the game actually runs worse then.

If i right click on the desktop I have two graphics related options, the first is the control center, and the second is switchable graphics.  In switchable graphics I can choose between power save mode and high preformance.  I tried setting ME3 to high preformance, but that causes the game to run very poorly (awful frame rate and very laggy).  It runs fine if I set it to power save, but then I run into crashing issues every 20 Min or so.  I have attempted to find upgraded drivers because the built in ones are from 2011, but because Lenovo has special drivers for the lenovo ideabook U400 there don't appear to be any more recent drivers.  also it is running at 1366x768 and I am plugged in whenever I am playing.

also i used MSI afterburner to record my temperature druing a play session, my max temperature was 77c,  This was when ME3 was set to power save mode, but I did notice that it quickly rose to 77 and then stayed there, so there was no spike when the crash happens.

Also just tried running the MSI afterburner test on the game running in "high preformance mode" and the temperature never goes above 56c, I also just noticed that when it is running in powersave mode MSI never records any GPU usage, but when I run in high preformace mode it jumps up to 100%.  Afterburner lists the recognized graphics card as AMD Radeon HD 6470m

Temperatures look totally fine for the GPU.

The power save mode should be the internal Intel GPU and High Performance the ATI.  It might be that MSI Afterburner isnt' able to record GPU usage for the Intel GPU, that's why there is no graph in power save mode. Odd, that the performance is worse on the ATI. If Lenovo doesn't have any newer drivers for your card, you should be able to use the ATI drivers from the AMD website, although you may have to switch the GPU in the BIOS to dedicated and then you can install them. If that doesn't work some modded drivers might, like the Omega ones.

I have tried to use the ATI drivers from the website, but those haven't worked because it says the hardware is incompatible.  I will look at the omega drivers but I am worred about them messing anything up on the system.  Also I looked in BIOS at switching to the dedicated c ard, but there was not an option (I don't that I couldn't find it, there simply was no option for it) I also haven't seen any BIOS updates for the U400, but I will look around a bit more, because perhaps there is an update that adds that option.

It appears, the U400 is rather special in that regard. I tried searching for it and came up with this thread where similar performance problems are discussed. Looks like the driver from Lenovo is somehow messed up and you indeed cannot select a GPU from the BIOS. One person could fix it by a factory reset and thus restoring the original drivers that came with the notebook that - according to him - work with the different performance modes.

I'm afraid there's not much you can do, as the Omega-Drivers might indeed mess with your configuration since it seems Lenovo made a rather strange dual GPU configuration that is prone to errors...