Upgrading from 5.5.0 to 5.5.2 driven by outdated SQL Express

Hello all,

We are currently running our 5.5 console database on an instance of SQL 2008 R2 which is no longer supported, so we need to move to something current. We are toying with uprading the current server or just building a new one and migrating over to it. The main questions I could not find an answer to is if we upgrade in place, I see it upgrades the database itself, however what about the SQL engine its running on? Does it give the option to actually upgrade SQL as well or is that something we need to do separately, then upgrade SEC to 5.5.2?

Thanks in advance!