We now have our first publicly known case of Steam Machine hardware failure.
As reported by Video Games Chronicle, this was posted in the r/steammachine subreddit with the title “Well, the Steam Machine was pretty cool for the 20 minutes that it worked.”
Redditor me_hill had apparently played No Man’s Sky in his machine for five minutes, installed the next hardware update, and it proceeded to brick itself.
As everyone is now talking about, his PC’s front facing LED emitted a bright red line, which caused reddit to dub it the Red Line of Death.
Unfortunately, this red line means that me_hill’s GPU had failed. This could mean that it isn’t possible to repair the machine anymore.
Valve has a one year limited warranty for their Steam Machines, so me_hill may have to send his unit in for a complete replacement. While Valve stated that they were constrained from making units, they should be more than prepared for situations like this.
