Forced external sort?

I've got a poorly indexed query and was attempting a quick work around
in production by increasing work_mem when it was called. EXPLAIN ANALYZE
is telling me this:

Sort Method: external sort  Disk: 1253824kB


So I set the work_mem to 2gb, still going to disk. I read Tom's
suggestion here
(http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/1936.1298394374@sss.pgh.pa.us) and
went all the way up to 92G or work_mem.

Did more googling and found this reference
(http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAMkU=1w2y87NJueqwN8-HK2KDb4UOihFAJXpO1NZ3EkHZvBmmQ@mail.gmail.com)
to a 1G sort limit that is going to be removed in 9.3.

Am I possibly experiencing the same issue even though I am on 9.3.1? Was
it really not fixed until 9.4?
(http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/557C7213.8000704@joeconway.com)