@GaryN I see, so you meant
horizontal alignment, and I assumed you meant vertical. Yeah, now
that is a problem. I suspect even Sonnet didn't realize the copper heatsinks were a thing early enough in time or, if they were aware, they assumed the alignment and all would be the same for all the heatsinks. In short, what most likely happened is that Sonnet got Apple'd!
I keep thinking there must be
something we could do about this, but I guess that would be ugly, nasty and convoluted...
Y'know, it might be worth a look to see if you can
perhaps find a 3rd party copper heatsink that will fit and also not have this issue. Some people tried that, and I don't know if they succeeded. I know I tried years ago, then gave up and went for the Apple one (as I wasn't affected by the MDX problem since I never got one). Or, probably better, it also seems like
liquid-cooling might be your best friend to address that very issue you pointed out.
Then again, a dual 7447 @1.83GHz is more than good enough for just about anything.
@DieHard I honestly think the pre-Quad-core liquid-cooled G5s were engineered precisely to lead people into accepting the upcoming switch to the generic IBM-PC-compatible Intel-based architecture. Even the MDD's power supply wasn't on the bottom. I don't think their engineers were incapable of seeing the issue with that design from the get-go.
I wonder if the power supply of a G5 could be externalized... But that'd be a different topic.