Hey all! My first post here, but I'm no stranger to building computers (as a hobby). I follow and subscribe to YouTuber Luke Miani, and he recently posted a video of him upgrading the cheapest 2013 "Trash Can" Mac Pro from its quad core processor to a 12 core Intel® Xeon® E5-2697 v2. I'd like to upgrade my home server, which is running on consumer parts (Intel Core i7 3770k (running at its stock 3.5 GHz), 32 GB of DDR3 (non-ECC) RAM, 4x4TB Seagate IronWolf HDDs in "RAID5" aka RAIDZ1 (ZFS), and a Gigabyte Z77 DP3 series motherboard. It's running FreeNAS 11.3-U1 as my server OS of choice. It's my Plex Media Server, but I'd like to rebuild it to give me more power for stuff like running VMs and other stuff that a 4-Core/8-thread CPU like the 3770k would suffer with and from.
With that said, what older(ish) server hardware would you guys recommend I get (everything from the CPU(s), PSU(s), motherboard and case) to perform this rebuild? The performance of the current server I have there isn't bad by any means, but I'd like to have a more proper "server" running, if you know what I mean. Would I benefit from a dual-socket board with two higher core count CPUs, or should I just get a consumer LGA 2011 mobo and get some sort of multi (north of 4-core) CPU? Lastly, if I was to get a dual-socket LGA2011 (for example) motherboard with a single E5-2697 v2 (for example) CPU would the system POST, given one CPU socket would be not occupied by a CPU? I really don't have a budget for this, as I'm just doing some research. This is a theoretical build.
Thanks in advance,
Shiggitay
EDIT: I had apparently already joined here back in December of 2018... So I guess this isn't my first post.... My questions above still apply though. lol