- There is a new red light problem with the Steam Machine
- This time, a steady red light will appear, indicating that the device is heating up
- This is not necessarily the case and in fact the Steam Machine’s temperatures may be normal and a fault in the BIOS may cause the light to come on
If you’re an early adopter who’s been worried about a red light being displayed by your Steam Machine while you’re gaming, there’s nothing to panic about, as this temperature warning light is apparently triggered by mistake.
VideoCardz noticed a thread on Reddit where the original poster shares correspondence from Valve’s support team about what happens in terms of the red light that turns on when the temperature is nowhere near the intended warning threshold.
According to Valve’s FAQ on the Steam Machine light bar, the red light is solid (across the entire bar) when the device is considered to be overheating, meaning the CPU temperature is above 95C or the GPU is above 90C (or indeed both).
The Redditor noted that the red light was on as their Steam Machine had temperatures of 75C and 81C for the GPU and CPU respectively, neither of which should have caused the warning light to appear.
As the message from Valve explains, there is a “known issue with the current BIOS” that means the red light comes on “much earlier” than it should.
The problem is entirely related to the temperature threshold of the light, and the steam engine does not overheat in any way in these cases, it should be noted.
The message from Valve informs us that a BIOS update will be coming to fix the problem soon. In fact, that update will increase the threshold to 100C for both CPU and GPU, which is the point where Steam Machine will throttle the components to ensure they don’t get hotter.
In case you were wondering, if either the CPU or GPU gets hotter than 100C, the device will then shut down to protect itself from any potential damage.
Analysis: false alarm
What this means is that if you see the red warning light a lot, it’s probably a symptom of this overloaded BIOS, which turns on the light much earlier than it should. Odds are your CPU and GPU are running cool enough and you can check this using the Steam performance monitor or a third party tool like the Redditor did.
In any case, even if you see the red light and it correctly indicates temperatures at the valve’s threshold levels, this will not damage the steam engine – it just means that the components will be throttled back to run more slowly to prevent such damage. If that doesn’t work and the component temps aren’t brought back under control, as mentioned, the PC will shut itself down to avoid potential GPU or CPU fry scenarios.
However, it’s not a pleasant thought that your Steam machine is throttling and not running as fast as it should if this happens – but based on this (and other) reports of this incident, it’s not the case, and the only fault is the light showing when it shouldn’t. No actual overheating, throttling or anything else happens under the hood.
If you’re concerned that Valve’s new temperatures for throttling and the warning light seem high at 100C, this is in line with what can be expected from AMD laptop parts (which is what’s used for the Steam Machine’s CPU and GPU).
For now, all those who bought one of Valve’s gaming PCs can do is wait for the next BIOS update, which should hopefully fix this issue. It’s also worth noting that the ‘Red Line of Death’ is a completely separate issue, and we’ve had some troubleshooting advice on the gnarlier issue since it was first highlighted.
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