Hello; I've had the RTX 2080 Ti XC GAMING (11G-P4-2382-KR) since November 2018 and it's been working great.
 
With a more demanding game (like SOTR) with DLSS and RTX on Medium (everything else max) I have been noticing an odd smell after a few hours of gameplay and decided to open up my PC while it was running last night.  I happen to have a thermal camera and noticed the warmest part of the PC was the backplate of the 2080Ti, which read 75°C.
 
While that's not "super hot" like close to 100°C, 75°C is up there.  I also noticed some strange staining of the backplate in certain areas that were not there before.  This doesn't do anything bad to the card and you can't see mine inside the PC anyway.  But has anyone else seen this before?  My hunch is that the thermal pad material is getting hot and releasing some vapors.
 
I also had a side fan in my PC case that I removed when I had the 1060SC, that card would vent out the back (blower design) and didn't get as hot.  So I think the side fan will solve the problem and no harm done, just that the thermal pads eVGA spec'd might not have a high temp rating.  See attached photo; it's not the water cooler on the CPU.  It is primarily around screw holes of the 2080Ti but not limited to just those spots.
 
Thanks!
 
P.S.  I used a little bit of isopropyl alcohol on a pad and with some light pressure tried to remove those stains; but it had no effect.

This is normal for evga cards.

What you're all saying then is "it's just cosmetic; don't worry about that smell that as it will go away with use".  :)  The smell changed a little over time.
 
Although I don't expect to see/smell more of this with the side fan replaced because it will add cooling; I will try a bit harder to remove the staining next time I open the PC.
 
Thanks!

It's probably the pads as you say; not a burning parts smell that I would likely be able to pick up.  (Had a few things burn out on me; we all know this smell).
 
The thermal grease might be vaporizing a bit and coming out a nearby screw hole (path of least resistance) as you're also thinking.
I'll try SOTR (Shadow of the Tomb Raider) again tonight and with the side fan see what happens.

Ok; this is my "final post" on this topic unless something else changes drastically.  An FYI and one caution.
 
I ran SOTTR (it has two Ts) for an hour with GPU-Z on this PC with the side fan and peak: temp was 77°C, 70% fan (both), 93% load, 266.1W, 102.3% TDP.  Cap reason was typically power and sometimes voltage+power.  So it's not overheating IMO (with the side fan at least) and that thermal grease just needs to boil away a bit as discussed above.
 
I also read some instructions on how to diagnose which driver caused the "IRQL not less or equal" BSOD although under stress I know it's probably a one-off crash of the GPU driver.  And NVIDIA makes that software, not eVGA.  :)
 
The process is to run the driver verifier built in Win 10; i.e. "verifier.exe /standard /all".  However I did this and my computer went into a BSOD boot loop.  Boot, crash, boot, crash, boot well you get the idea.  It took a bit of troubleshooting (almost an hour) to get my system working again; so I would be cautious about running this feature.  I'm running the latest driver hotfix x.68 and if it is driver related then it should be fixed later.  First time I've seen this, or it was a very long time ago...