You have SLI disabled. That said, a single 970 should perform better than a radeon 6800 tier card so turn SLI on and see what happens.

Ive tried that, no diffrence, tf2 isnt appering to use the cards, my cards are sitting at their idle clocks in game

Doesn't TF2 and just source in general have lots of issues with SLI and crossfire? I thought it does, I might be wrong and just an idiot tho.

Haven't noticed any problems with my SLI 980s

Well you need that setting set to "Maximise 3D performance" for other games anyway so leave it on

Did you purchase two video cards just for TF2 or do you play lots of other games as well? Unfortunately, being heavily cpu-bound, the source engine doesn't benefit much (at all, actually) from a second GPU in most cases. In several test systems, I've noticed average FPS being anywhere from roughly equal to convincingly lower than a single GPU in TF2 over the past 5 years. Additionally, you have the added feature of microstutter as well as other fun SLI-related anomalies to deal with once you enable that second GPU.

SLI is unfortunately a very underwhelming technology for those of us who are sensitive to things like input latency and microstutter. If you purchased the cards new, I would very highly recommend returning them and buying the nicest single GPU card you can get for that money, if possible. If you intend to keep your setup for a few years, you'll be better off getting a single GPU with a ton of VRAM since newer games are starting to utilize 6GB and even 12GB rigs.

Regarding your performance with a single card, it's likely because of what you've already noted, that your video cards are running at idle clocks. This can be caused by several things. Are you running TF2 in windowed mode? If so, try it in full-screen.

Alrighty i will try running at full screen non windowed and see if it makes a diffrence

My SLI 980s are fine running TF2 in borderless windowed mode.

Also SLI's problems with microstutter were fixed long before the issue was brought to the general public's attention. By the time it was widely publicised only CrossFire had problems.

David, I'm glad that you are running without issues, and I do agree that the problem has been minimized since early 2014, but microstutter is still very real and cannot be -completely- eliminated due to the architecture of using multiple cards with crappy, slow bridges. Using two or more cards will always result in a higher frame variance than a single card simply because the PCIe bus is much slower than the card's internal circuitry. There are various tweaks that can be applied to the Nvidia settings to minimize it, and in certain games it is almost unnoticeable due to programmers actually actively negating it in engine code, but unfortunately it's still unusable for many. I'm actually jealous that you don't notice it, but I've yet to use a system running SLI that didn't drive me crazy (and this includes SLI 980 Ti cards around July of this year). I am hyper-sensitive to that sort of thing, though.

Windowed mode -shouldn't- be an issue, but it is possible that his cards are not properly detecting 3D rendering and ramping up the clocks (obviously not a guarantee).