Sandy Bridge in a nutshell:

With the desktop chips they can only be used in single cpu setups and you have a MAX of 64GB of ram and no registered ECC support.


With the server chips (E5 Xeon) you have a max of 750GB of memory ( a max of 375GB with the 1600 series). Both have registered and ECC support. The 2600 series can be used it dual configurations while the 1600 series can only be used in single chip setups.


Check out ark.intel.com to see the details.