I am having some pretty bad stuttering while running my 1080 FE's in SLI. Basically what happens is whatever game I am playing will stutter for about a half second, and MSI Afterburner reports a frame drop. It happens every few minutes, and you can clearly see the frame stuttering in Afterburner. Does anyone else have this issue? I have tried many things to fix it, such as doing a clean reinstall of Windows 10 Pro, reseating the cards, and switching to a standard SLI bridge (I was using a HB one). The issue seems to be less obvious when using the standard SLI bridge. I have read that this may be related to Gsync, so tonight when I am home from work, I will do testing with GSync disabled. I'll also do some testing on 120Hz instead of 144hz. For reference, this user on the GeForce forums has the EXACT same issue I'm having, with no clear solution. 
 
https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/946036/sli/gtx-1080-sli-stutter-at-144hz-even-with-new-hb-sli-bridge/
 
Any suggestions guys? This is REALLY frustraing

I have a g-sync monitor as well and it's not happening at 165hz.. like I said would if I had that hardware monitor detached and on the desktop. Prob what it is. Close that and just have the osd up and you should be fine.. unless it's something else runing in the background.

http://forums.evga.com/Basic-troubleshooting-steps-Windows-clean-boot-clean-driver-install-debug-mode-etc-m2451023.aspx
 
Step one of that guide will confirm or eliminate background software as the culprit.

When the stutter occurs are your gpu clocks dropping?

Windows 10 bulid 1607? If yes, do you have game dvr disabled?

Looking back, I noticed the stuttering right after I switched out some SSDs and went with two Intel 535s in RAID 0. I wonder if that has anything to do with it..
 

Agreed. All of my games are installed on the RAID array anyhow...I'll swap back to my old Kingston's and report back

Could be, however I never updated or changed the software/drivers for the RAID array when I swapped the drives. 

CSPlayer089
Could be, however I never updated or changed the software/drivers for the RAID array when I swapped the drives. 

Oh was thinking before you just used a single ssd and then moved to raid ssd.

CSPlayer089
It only occurs when SLI is enabled, and when a game has a proper SLI profile. In one of my games, for instance, Mirrors Edge catalyst, it uses alternate frame rendering 2 and the issue doesn't occur. I also don't notice it during synthetic benchmarks such as unigine heaven or firestrike

Starting to sound like a driver issue.

CSPlayer089
Agreed. Like I said before, on games that are a little older and allow me to hit 144FPS average, I noticed the issue occuring. In the NVCP, I have VSync set to Application Controlled and run it thru whatever game I am playing. If I switch them, (ON in the NVCP and OFF in whatever game I'm playing), the issue occurs. I read somewhere about setting a frame limit 1 FPS below your max refresh rate, i.e. 143FPS on a 144Hz monitor. I might try that. 

Let us know if it helps. 

Hmm. Maybe it's your monitor? I have no issue playing older games that run at 144 fps on my 144Hz monitor with g-sync enabled.

I just tested again with ULMB enabled instead of G-Sync. I did not have the stuttering problem. Very odd. 

Crazy..

Glad you figured it out.