try to swap the entire cooler with the good msi armor see if the problem follows the cooler.
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?
In 2018 i had rx470 armor like authors of this post. You are right heat pipe was working. You can easily diagnouse it by touching the the tubes or if you have couple of multimeters it has temperature sensor. Attach the sensor on tube and look.in my case heat pipe was not reacting at all. I replaced radiator from dead xfx 480. I need to cut some parts but it is still working this days.