I have done some research and am looking at a SUPERMICRO SYS-7037A-I to run an Engineering software package that can benefit from large amounts of ram, which this motherboard supports. Our question is If we want to install 1 Xeon E5-26xx CPU now will we still be able to install 16 memory chips or are half of the memory slots tied to one CPU and the other half need another CPU installed?
The memory channel is direct connect to processor. If you only had one processor install with 16 DIMMS populated it will read on half of the memory. See attachment chipset block below.