OK I think i fixed it everyone! what I did was went an re-installed the latest stable NVIDIA drivers ( I was currently running the latest beta drivers) during the re-install I clicked custom install, at the bottom of the screen i clicked clean install. It installed the drivers, felt like the very first time i installed the cards, then went into the nvidia control panel and enabled SLI. I loaded the game with the visual indicators on and now I can verify that SLI is enabled and that my GPU utilization is running as expected!

Thanks for all the valuable input! It sure was frustrating me!

Thanks Ryios!