In something of a bizarre twist, the recent reports of a Steam Machine "red line of death" that seemed to indicate a GPU issue were apparently merely a BIOS issue. According to an original post on r/steammachine on Reddit, a user who goes by u/me_hill suffered what appeared to be a GPU failure on their Valve Steam Machine as little as 20 minutes after setting it up. However, after contacting Steam Support and working through some troubleshooting steps provided by commenters on the Reddit thread, the original poster updated the thread explaining that they "left [the Steam Machine] 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."

A comment by u/SteamHWFeedback, an official Valve support account on Reddit, explained, in response to another user with the same issue, that the curious behavior reported in both cases was indicative of a BIOS or memory training issue, and that unplugging and power cycling the Steam Machine, then plugging it back in and performing a BIOS reset should be enough to trigger memory training on the next power cycle. Many redditors are urging the user to contact Valve about the issue anyway, since it occurred at random, but as the Valve representative indicated, it seems as though the Steam Machine rebooted in the middle of an incomplete BIOS update.