The snapperazzi hit Monaco

HERE'S A SELECTION OF PIX taken at the System Builder conference in Monaco last week.

Here's Andreas Stiller, in a helicopter with yours truly, flying into Monaco and hoping that the rotisserie keeps running long enough for us to be able to stand on terra firma.

Palm trees, blue skies, system builders, vendors, distributors - what more do you need for a lovely holiday by the sea?

Well you need PCs, don't you? We wandered up to the INTC stand where they had this machine which they described as very quiet indeed. We thought we'd seen it somewhere before - isn't this the Signum baby we reviewed here some time back under the headline Silence of the PC Lambs? Yes. One guy at the stand said I'm only talking to you if you don't misquote me, like last time. Did we get it right this time David?

Hercules-Guillemot doing LCD screens at €399, eh? The firm has a 17-inch version coming out in June but hasn't priced it up yet. On its booth it also had examples of its Thrustmaster Ferrari wheels - quite suitable for Monaco and AMD we thought.

A massive array of Creative cards and speakers. Did you know that there's so much air in the soon to be rebranded entire Creative retail range that when you ship a container from Singapore to Europe, the contents are far lighter than the steel case they're enclosed in? Those boys just love their big cardboard boxes containing their tiny cards - but are looking forward to the chipsets they launch in Q4 of this year, which won't need all that external packaging.

Big is Beautiful, right? Wrong. If you're Shuttle, small is beautiful and the industry is currently going through one of its periodic phases where "small form factors" - Atishoo! are back in fashion again. Shuttle's little booth was swathed in cigarette smoke as the guy reached for another tab, business being as busy as it was.

Small is Beautiful - according to Via, with the firm showing off its Web reference pad. A standard reference design of a packet of chewing gum is there to give you an idea of the size. Via was also showing off its Micro ITX board, which we reproduce here, along with the same reference design packet of chewing gum.

What's this Mike? A picture of a mug from a distributor? What's interesting about that? Well, mega-distributor Avnet was giving away lots of freebies at the SysBuilderShow - and we swear they gave us a mug that looked like this when they only distributed AMD processors. Now that they distribute Intel chips too, the AMD logo on the mug seems to have been overprinted with a big black strip.

This little pic doesn't really demonstrate the craziness that the bigger one does. This is some mad overclocking rig that some firm has put together. Shame that according to a guy from Gartner, no one's interested in overclocking any more.

Via's booth. If you look closely, you'll see that AMD - which didn't have a stand - appeared to be renting out part of Via's booth. We bunged our bag down on the floor and some woman from the stand next to Via's went a brighter shade of incandescent. Apparently there was some bitter territorial dispute because Via had moved its table by a clear centimetre, and we somehow became involved as the lady nearly tripped the light fantastic over our haversack. Sheesh, as Eva says.

SIS was also there at the System Builder show, but didn't have a great deal there in the way of chipset info - instead it was majoring on the very purple Xabre range of cards - there's a big version of this photo here.

Yes - how charming it is to gaze out at sea as you sip your little can of Kronenbourg 1664 at the very inexpensive price of €7.50, wondering if you can be bothered to make it to the Grand Casino later in the evening and then perhaps go for a spot of jigging at Jimmy's and perhaps then fall over on the F1 stands and gash your head at 5 AM like the poor guy from Polar did... Oooh la la...