"Red line of death" - Steam Machine encounters its first major hardware fault and it's already got a fitting Xbox-inspired nickname

GPU can't make these things up.

Valve's Steam Machine has encountered its first major hardware fault, and people have already given it a fitting nickname.

Reddit user me_hill was among the first few to receive their Steam Machine this week, only for it to stop working a few short minutes later. Their Steam Machine conked out after installing the latest firmware update, displaying a red line on the light bar on the front of the console, prompting the nickname 'red line of death'.

According to the Reddit user, the Steam Machine is no longer usable, and it appears to have happened after playing No Man's Sky for five minutes. "Got five minutes of No Man's Sky in, then I installed the update the machine had available and it bricked itself," me_hill said. "If you're still in the queue, look on the bright side: they're presumably going to iron this crap out."

Image credit: me_hill

As pointed out by Digital Foundry, this red light on the right-side of the bar is an error code intended to help users identify the fault. The Steam Machine support page notes that this particular code signals that the system has detected a GPU failure. This tracks with the Reddit user's experience, who confirmed they're unable to get any display output on their monitor, which can be a sign of a faulty GPU.

Various members of the Steam Machine subreddit have been offering troubleshooting steps to potentially get the machine working again, but the best advice appears to be to contact Valve support and get the company to replace it with a new device. This might prove difficult, however, given how few Steam Machines have been made.

The news sends a shiver down the spine of anyone who lived through the Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death, which is where this nickname comes from, or the less common PlayStation 3 Yellow Light of Death. Unfortunately for me_hill, they were also a victim of the former.

It's hard to determine how widespread this issue is as there's always some percentage of faulty units with any new piece of kit. Everyone will be watching that subreddit over the next few weeks to see if we have another RRoD epidemic on our hands.