Nozzle Guide Vanes aero-thermal performance is commonly assessed in the industry using tangentially-averaged quantities, imposed at the combustor-turbine interface as inlet conditions for RANS models. However, recent studies have shown that scale-resolving approaches can reproduce the impact of unsteady fluctuations on turbulent mixing. An experimental test case with a combustor simulator and a nozzle cascade is investigated, comparing two numerical modelling strategies: i) Scale-adaptive simulation (SAS) including both combustor and turbine; ii) RANS simulation of the nozzles with SAS-derived combustor outlet conditions. This work is the continuation of a previous activity that revealed the capabilities of unsteady CFD to improve the prediction of flow field and film-cooling adiabatic effectiveness. The comparison is herein extended to heat transfer, to highlight the benefits of combustorturbine conjugate simulations, in addition to address the impacts on vanes heat load due to highly swirled rather than uniform inlet flow fields.