Thanks for this!

I know it's an old thread (found searching on google) but I had a couple older cards laying around that for some reason ran extremely hot no matter what I did. I tried the usual things like reapplying thermal compound, cleaning dust out, running super low voltages, etc.

After finding this I swapped the entire heat-sink cooler with another that ran fine and it worked. Until coming across this post I would have never thought the cooler would be the problem, as its mainly a hunk of metal with two fans attached, which in my case the fans were good.

So is it the liquid inside the little tubes that leaks out or what? I might try my luck on eBay and buy some parts-only GPUs for the cooler portion, but how to know if they are good?