Why did you run the cooler in that position? Seems rotating it 90 degrees like they are normally mounted would alleviate some of the ram height issue. I do not know how large the fan is, but assuming a 25mm stance it should still allow to use high height RAM even with fan blowing RAM to VRMs.
Using a 38mm fan on my megahalem, I actually put it on the back side, as 38mm shoves it across the first 2 DIMM slots. Standard ram still works fine though.
For sandyB I run in the orientation you are running because miah suggested it runs slightly cooler, which does effect mounting RAM, but I put the fan blowing towards the vid card not sucking the air from it. (Generally CPUs are so much cooler than GPUs that blowing the warmed air from the CPU still helps cool the backside of the card
)