I can tell that the cooler assembly is pretty much identical to the 6800XT and 6900XT variant of the ASUS TUF without taking it apart. There are enough little gaps to look through most of the stuff and determine that. And from the research I've done the whole heat pipe and fin stack assembly is exactly the same they use on the Strix variant as well.
This is a picture from someone else who took the XT variant apart:
One other thing I'll be trying soon is relocating my M.2 SATA SSD, which is placed directly underneath the GPU. It generates some heat as well and usually sits at 50°C+ which is probably not too healthy for it either. Ordered a M.2 to SATA adapter and will report back if it made any difference.
ASUS also replied today, telling me that the junction temperature can rise up to 95°C and thus can be higher than the GPU Hotspot and that this property is taken into account from the design point of view of the graphics card.
Would be great to know if this really is typical behaviour for this cooler assembly but I couldn't find any HWinfo posts about this one from other people, so I have no real comparison. Probably doesn't help that even if we find find one, they may have a model with Micron or Samsung VRAM, not SK Hynix like mine. I feel there is still a slim chance that the readouts may not be entirely accurate for my VRAM but that's not something I can validate myself.
Still need to find something to test how hot these modules can potentially get in my configuration. If mid 80s under load really is the ceiling, it wouldn't be great but at least not nearly as terrible as the PS5 VRAM. lol
Anyway, I still have over 2 years of warranty on this card, so should the VRAM kick the bucket I'm going to make it ASUSs problem. In case it outlasts its warranty I'll take it apart, do some more direct measurements and possibly replace the thermal pads.
Made some more light test, one roughly 3h session of browsing, YT and office work on 2 monitors and the other playing Quake II RTX on max settings while watching a video on the second monitor.
The screenshot of the gaming session was made about 15 minutes after I closed the game and went back to browsing. During the game VRAM temps stayed in the 80-83°C range. These tests were done with default settings in the AMD Software, so no UV, OC or fan curve adjustments.
Once again, thank you for your time.
Edit: Taking another look at the screenshots, the memory clock peaked at an odd frequency. I'm certain that I didn't have any memory OC on and even if I did, the AMD Software only allows up to 2150MHz. Strange.