It worked! Waited to post until the money was officially in my account, which it is as of a lil while ago. Rather than try to swap the serial stickers and risk damaging them I swapped the backplate and the fans, so the one I was returning was all new minus the motherboard/actual GPU sandwiched in the middle.
It was maybe 7 screws all together and I ran Furmark for about 10 minutes beforehand to get the card nice and warm, which allowed the sticky thermal pads to easily release. Cleaned off oily adhesive residue and dust from the surrounding areas with qtips and alcohol. On the new card there was a sticker with a little code on it on the part that google images is telling me is called the PCIe connector- I used a hairdryer and a razor blade and it came off easily. I applied some glue stick with a toothpick (but not too thicc) and transferred it to the same spot on the old card. The only visible differences that remained were some film-like stickers on the housing of the display ports that had printed codes on the new one but that were blank on mine. They were not cooperative whatsoever so I just left them. Could only see them if you looked inside the card and it was a small detail.
Super happy and may this information serve the greater good.
Lmao. I dunno where I read this but it was probably on here I guess, but I read that Alex Jones was repping Schools for Chiapas coffee for a while obviously not knowing wtf he was supporting which is pretty funny.