With the Steam Machine starting to land in some lucky buyers hands, a few of the gremlins in Valve’s compact living-room PC have started to surface. But while some might remind you of infamous hardware failures of old, many of them are smartly designed errors that you can, for the most part, resolve yourself.
Last week, the Steam Machine subreddit was rocked with what the community described as the “Red Line of Death,” a reference to the catastrophic Red Ring of Death that plagued early Xbox 360 units. The users in question seemed to think the Steam Machine in question was bricked and beyond repair, but a few resets and some BIOS updates later, the PC was restored. Perhaps most interesting was how it surfaced the smart way in which Valve is relaying vital hardware information when something does fail.
The error this unfortunate Reddit user encounterd was probably the worst of the lot, with the half width, breathing red LED bar indicating a GPU failure. Different bar widths with different animations point to entirely different issues, however. Our own Steam Machine usage has run into another error, where the Steam Machine displayed a full, solid red bar, indicating an overheating issue.
Steam support has a full page breaking down the meanings of different light bar colors and animations, and what they’re telling you about the state of your Steam Machine. While some less crucial ones will be overwritten by your custom light bar settings, ones paired with critical errors will always be displayed. They give you an easy way to communicate what might be wrong with your Steam Machine should you need to contact support, which many of the worst issues suggest you do.
Valve’s Steam Machine went on sale last month, with a starting price of $1050. It’s a price that Valve itself wasn’t happy with, but explained that its increase was similar to the recent Steam Deck price hike that was similarly drive by the ongoing memory crisis.