Soyori Build Log

The Sleeping Dragon Awakens

I found the PC case for this build for a pretty reasonable $50 pricetag on eBay, so I figured I would take a shot at turning her into the gaming beast I knew she could be.

Despite the SOYO Dragon having been left to collect dust for almost 20 years, she was still in pretty decent condition. After some light cleanup and disassembly, I started adding in the new components for a much-needed upgrade.

I decided to go with an all AMD build this time as I normally prefer using both AMD or Intel with NVIDIA graphics. For the CPU, I went with an experimental AMD Ryzen 9 CPU based off of the 7900X paired with an MSI X670e Gaming Plus WiFi ATX Motherboard to go along with the “Dragon” theme. ID-Cooling's 240mm AIO cooler helps to keep the hot temperatures under control and prevent this beastly rig from overheating.

I was surprised to find that SOYO is still releasing products to this very day (albeit they’re just Chinese rebrands of pre-existing GPU designs), so I went for their Dragon Monarch Radeon RX 5700XT 8GB graphics card. Really brings this whole build full circle in a bizarrely funny way. Since I didn't have much else in terms of options for RAM, I used a pair of 16GB DDR5 5600MTs Kingston Fury sticks.

Storage wise, I wanted something reliable and fast; a large amount of space for games while also keeping read/write times as quick as possible. To that end, I bought a 1TB M.2 NVME SSD from Western Digital that could easily be installed into the motherboard with little to no hassle. Finally, for the power supply, I went with a Corsair RM750 750W Modular PSU for ease of use and easy installation into such a unique case.

After installing Windows 11 onto her and some benchmarking, she runs like an absolute champ. Temps stayed reasonably mid with some heat spikes in more intense tests, but overall she performed way beyond any and all of my expectations. Might put in more additions like a DC/AC converter and some front panel I/O, but that will be for another time.