E5700 CPU, need motherboard or ditch it?

[SpiralCee]

Bear with me here, I'm a girl! And I'm very new to this stuff, so I'm googling like mad to try to make sense of everything. I'll do my best to let you know the technical details, but forgive me if I mess it up.

I have a HP Compaq dc5100 SFF with an NVIDIA GeForce 8400 video card.

I bought an Intel Pentium E5700 Dual-Core CPU thinking it would upgrade things, but it doesn't work. From what I can tell, it's because my motherboard won't support dual core.

So...I'm thinking I have two options.
1. Find a motherboard that will work with the E5700 and that will fit in my very tiny and very troublesome form factor.
2. Sell the E5700 on eBay and start over, either with a whole new computer or a CPU/motherboard combo that works together out of the box.

Other info:
A. I am upgrading for gaming. I can run SWTOR right now on the lowest settings, but the lag is nasty!
B. I'm in Canada and usually buy from Tiger Direct or New Egg.
C. I'm poor as dirt! I need a very low cost solution, most bang for my buck sort of thing. I definitely can't spend more than $400 all-in.

Thank you so much for your help!

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

Here is the problem really need to be using a processor based off the Intel® Core™2 Duo or later (which the Intel Pentium® E5700 is) to see much of a performance increase. Now the problem with this is that the board that looks to be used in that case is not a standard form factor and the chipset (915GV) won't support anything later then maybe an Intel Pentium D processor. So your best bet is to pick up something like this http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883155338

That should give you a much better processor and then try to pick up a video card to give you the gaming performance that you need. Here is the info on the Dell http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/optix/en/opti_755_techspecs.pdf


Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team