Steam Machines are off to a rocky start, or so it seemed. A reported hardware failure made the rounds online and the community quickly gave it a name that made any Xbox 360 veteran deeply uncomfortable. The ‘Red Line of Death’ had entered the chat, and for a brief moment, it looked like Valve’s new hardware had a serious problem on its hands.
As it turns out, the situation was far less dramatic than it appeared.
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Steam Machine’s ‘Red Line of Death’ Scare Turns Out to Be a False Alarm
The first reported case came from r/SteamMachine user me_hill, flagged by Digital Foundry. Their Steam Machine stopped showing display output after a firmware update, with a red line across the LED light bar and a glowing red dot on the power button. The machine had seen just 20 minutes of total use, five of which were spent in No Man’s Sky before the firmware update seemingly bricked it.
The Steam Machine support page confirmed the red light indicates a GPU failure, which understandably sent the community into a brief panic and spawned comparisons to the Xbox 360’s notorious Red Ring of Death.
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After the post gained traction, me_hill returned with an update that changed everything. After leaving the machine unplugged overnight and trying again the next morning, it booted up immediately without any issue.
In his own words, user me_hill described it as an “anticlimactic and somewhat embarrassing update”, adding that anyone who encounters the same error should “not panic” and simply let the machine sit unplugged for a few hours before trying again.
The GPU error code, as alarming as it looked, resolved itself entirely on its own. Also, this does not point to a widespread hardware defect. A red error light that resolves after sitting unplugged overnight is a far cry from a genuine GPU failure, and nowhere close to the systemic crisis the Xbox 360’s Red Ring of Death turned out to be.
That said, a firmware update triggering a GPU error code on a machine with 20 minutes of use is the kind of first impression Valve will want to avoid repeating.
Featured Image Credit
Image via Steam
