Jay Deah

E5 Xeon's won't work in an R710 motherboard, its a Westmere (Socket B) motherboard. 
If you want a Dell board, you'd need an R420 or R520, they support the E5 2400 series. (or an R620 or R720 for the E5 2600 series)
 
The boards also have custom socketing for power, so you'd have to jerry-rig that if you wanted to run this without a case. 
It's going to be very ghetto having parts laying all over the place as well...its generally better to get a bare bones. 
 
If you can't afford the £500 to get a proper one, then maybe just get an old R710? The X5670's are very cheap for them. 

If you don't know the difference, it's very much unlikely you'll have any need for a managed switch. Managed switches offer functionality like e.g. VLANs, QoS, some of them offer full packet-filtering and so on -- that is, they are generally meant for complex networks. Performance-wise there is no difference.

powerline *might work*. it depends on the quality of the cables in your home. it can be hit or miss. the more splits and hubs it has to go through, the lower speed. it will not work through surge protectors. 
 
running a long cable is best option for reliability and speed. powerline for convenience and neatness (although risky with reliability)

If you just need backup, why not go with cloud as your backup solution? 

AWS, GCP, Azure (that's more popular in Europe from what I hear) should all (of course) have plenty of capacity, and can give you just data backup, machine image backups, or you can have full-on redundant applications running if you need that. 

 

I wish some businesses got this....we have some old voice platforms we support for customers that refuse to invest in upgrading the infrastructure....some are as bad as old Celeron servers from the early 00's...its got to the point i just ignore 90% of the monitoring on their platforms 

Dell optiplexes use custom headers for things like power button, frontpanel and stuff like that. Maybe inspiron is the same. Open yours up and take a look at all the connectors and confirm you have the ability to plug them into standard ATX things.

1. Typically ISPs send the fiber into an ONT which then gives you ethernet. You can't just plug their fiber into an SFP+ port and expect it to work. It does depend on how the ISP does their fiber though (If you're lucky, it's direct connection, but I doubt it)
2. There is no such thing as SC fiber vs SFP+ fiber. They use the types of fiber. SFP+ modules can have different ends (typically LC is the most popular). What matters is matching the type of fiber the ISP has (Can be MM for Multimode or SM for Single Mode fiber, and then there's different levels such as OM2, OM3, etc)
3. Typically you're forced to use the ISP equipment. I doubt they would allow a third party ONT on their systems (I mean you can ask though).
Could you post the model number of the modem router switch combo? I find it odd that the fiber goes directly to it (Different than how Verizon Fios does it here using an ONT)

You mean gpu acceleration?

the 2850 is Super Super Super Old. I pay people to take away stuff that's 10 years newer than that.
 
2008R2 removed support for the PERC4e. you'll need to use original 2008 or 2003
https://www.dell.com/community/PowerEdge-OS-Forum/Windows-Server-2012-on-PowerEdge-2800/td-p/3978790
 
which again, is so damn old whats the point.

unraid uses software raid, so the raid levels on the motherboard don't matter(and don't use mother board raid anyways, its sucks)
 
unRAID doesn't use normal raid, it has its own custom raid solution with parity on a single disk, kinda like raid4, but pretty customized.
 
If you want traditional raid, don't run unraid, there are many other nas oses that will do traditional raid well.
 
What hardware are you using?

Then maybe you should order an Off the shelves Fileserver from Dell, HP, Lenovo or whoever else.
 
Please use ECC Memory - wich no "higher end" Intel don't support.
So either use real server hardware or something else...
 
The next thing: Server 2012 on a new server? RLY?! Especially since the Hardware you chose isn't officially compatible with the Desktop Version of your Windows!
If you have to stick with Windows, you should evaulate a more recent system.
 
A Consumer Water Cooler is not something you want in a server, get a decent "Air Cooler" as there is nothingt to go wrong with them.
 
And what about Storage? 
What about RAID?
What about Backup??
 
Since he seems like an Expert in Storage systems - wich I am not, I tag @leadeater He probably (certainly) knows more than I do about Servers.

test the adapters when they are both in the same room and see if things improve, if so its your wiring.

There is always something faster "Coming Soon".

It's rather odd because the iGPU while inside the CPU package it's a different processing unit altogether, what's your memory configuration like?

https://uk.webuy.com/product-detail/?id=scpuinti57500a

When you added the second connection, did you setup an entirely new dry loop on a 2nd phone line? Or are you splitting the existing phone line?
 
Your line might simply be too far away from the Demarc (the "node") to handle a 2nd 2Mbps connection.

Okay. Sorry to be like this, but please try to use coherent sentences a bit more... That was very hard to read and made it difficult to understand what you did. 

moving on from that: If you meant that his GPU worked properly in your system, at any point in time, that means the GPU is fine. I would get him to run DDU: https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html

Then re-download the drivers from nvidia, and install them again. It'll probably work. 

I think it’s unfair to say “PSU Experts seem to know nothing” just because you bought an A-Tier PSU and it happened to break. Manufacturing defects are a thing, no matter how good the product is, unfortunately.

would never even consider that upgrade. spiking to 100% just means it gets drawn to its full potential. (in other words, those spikes to 100% are meaningless)
 
also core i5 and i7 mean practically nothing in terms of the CPU. 
 
also dont upgrade unless you feel that you need to, which you clearly dont. 
 
save your cash, especially considering the CPUs you will be upgrading wont be top of the line in a couple of months. 

That kind of performance decrease is no bottleneck my friend.

Those generations of xeons were just sandy bridge processors without integrated graphics. The e3-1240 is basically an i7 2600. The i7 is clocked at 3.4ghz and the xeon is 3.3. It's a drop in replacement on most h61. Motherboards. 

the top end core i5 models like the 7600k are still solid performers in gaming and sell for significantly less. if youre on a budget then look into these. i wouldnt buy new tho as prices are silly, look on the secondhand market, especially stores that trade in second hand gear (like CEX in the UK)
 
from what i can tell there's no huge differences between the 6th and 7th gen intel processors, just features you clearly dont use as you dont currently have them. So also consider a 6000 series top end i5/i7 if the price is right. i have no personal experience tho, i jumped from 3rd gen to 8th gen

Isopropyl alcohol with a paper towel or something 

such a stupid word that people just throw around without understanding it.
 
look, either of those cards will work fine for you and you'll probably be happy with the performance.
 
could you eek a few more frames out with a better CPU? probably? will you care? unlikely.

go to bios and enable XMP, that should automatically do the voltages and clock speeds for you