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198

Steam Machine's "Red Line of Death" [dubbed as "major hardware fault" by Eurogamer] single occurrence, resolved by keeping unplugged for a night. (archive.is)

submitted 1 day ago by alessandro@lemmy.ca to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca

38 comments fedilink hide all child comments

original quote:

Anticlimactic and somewhat embarrassing update: as some people suggested, I left it unplugged for about half an hour last night and then tried plugging it back in... and it didn't work. So I left it unplugged for a couple of hours and then tried it again before bed... and it didn't work. Same error light despite multiple power-cycling attempts. So I left it unplugged overnight and plugged it back in today to try some of the BIOS stuff that other people suggested... and it booted up immediately without issue.

I feel stupid about even posting this now, especially since it blew up a bit, but I was tired and irritable after a long day of work, and an ominous GPU error code wasn't exactly the seamless plug-and-play experience I had hoped for. But I guess if anyone encounters the same error, don't panic like I did, just let it sit for a few hours and it will somehow sort itself out. Anyway, I'm sorry for the false alarm, thanks to everyone who suggested solutions, and now I'm going to spend this weekend playing Crusader Kings until my eyes hurt.

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[–] 4am@lemmy.zip 20 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Leaving it unplugged means capacitors drain. Not sure what issues that would solve that wouldn’t be related to hardware failure.

Still, only a single hardware failure reported so far and some news outlets ran with “MAJOR failure in Steam Machine, GabeN in shambles, Valve BTFO, Sony was right all along, apologize to Nintendo right now”

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

A random bit flip in memory. Sometimes errors can be retained.

[+] village604@adultswim.fan -6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

That's a hardware issue

Edit: I guess it's more of a physics issue, but still not a software issue.

[–] towerful@programming.dev 8 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Yeh, but is extremely outside of any manufacturers control for consumer level gear.
For mission-critical satellites or space crafts, then it's either a 3-way-quorum or extremely ruggedised processors specifically designed for the radiation of space (with a massive performance penalty).

It's not something you buy off the shelf. It is a specific requirement that is built in at all levels of hardware, firmware and software.

So, if the steam machine is designed for high radiation environments then it's steams fault.
Seeing as it isn't, a cosmic bit flip that is actually able to impact hardware negatively is so extremely unlikely that it isn't Steam's issue. At all.

[–] village604@adultswim.fan 1 points 18 hours ago

I didn't say it would be Steam's fault. Just that a bit flip is a hardware issue, not a software one.

[–] AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@piefed.social 3 points 1 day ago

Eh you know how's the hate train. It drives way more clicks to just create ragebait than to report news.

In the videogame world however, seems to be worse as the average "journalist" is basically a guy who can put letters together.

[–] Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 day ago

Over heating can behave like this, but doesn’t seem likely.