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Early Steam Machine units have started to reach early pre-order customers, and so far it's been quite an excitable mood on the /r/SteamMachine subreddit. For /u/me_hill though, the tone has been slightly different, as the user reported that their Steam Machine started showing a "red line of death" on the front-mounted LED display following an apparent GPU issue after playing No Man's Sky and then performing a firmware update.
Following the error, the unit doesn't seem to be usable at all. It's not clear whether the problem can be fixed in software, but hopefully the normally-capable Steam Support staff will be up to the task of either replacing the unit or walking the user through a fix.
As you might have gathered, the LED indicator on the front can be used to signify all manner of things while the Steam Machine is on - such as download and update progress, for instance - but it also provides fault codes if the device suffers any issues that prevent it from booting.
The Steam Support website provides several explanations of these fault codes, including a full red bar (the device is overheating), a blinking red bar in the fourth quadrant (no RAM detected), a blinking red bar in the second quadrant (no SSD detected), a blinking red bar in the first half (memory training failed) and a blinking red bar on the right half (GPU failure). It's a nice alternative to a segmented LED display, but it does rather open the door to classic red ring of death comparisons.
Hopefully this is just a one-off rather than a common failure, but I guess we'll find out as more Steam Machine purchase emails are sent and more units start to reach customers. I'm still in the queue for the 512GB model here in the UK, for what it's worth!
Has your Steam Machine arrived yet? Are you still waiting to order? Or are you not interested whatsoever? Let me know in the poll above or the comments below.