If the shipping company puts the box on its side (or *gasp* upside down!) are you SOL? I'm pretty sure that they are speaking in very long-terms there and in regards to the heat sink being able to do its job. Like SH said, if I can't set the thing on its side for a few minutes while I work on something then it's not a component that I'd like to have in my system to to reliability concerns. This probably applies to most any HT component as they tend to be engineered to sit in basically one position.