Valve Fixes Steam Machine's Overheating Warning With a BIOS Update

Console launches rarely go smoothly right out of the gate, and the Steam Machine has spent its first stretch on the market dealing with a warning that left buyers confused about what was actually wrong with their hardware.

What looked at first like a hardware failure turned out to be a calibration issue, and Valve has now confirmed the fix.

Reports of a "red line of death" started to surface soon after the Steam Machine was sold to the public instead of being given as early samples. People who owned the system at first thought it had been completely bricked. Some owners found that a CMOS refresh fixed the problem, suggesting the issue might be software-related rather than hardware-related.

Valve came back with a better explanation: the red line never meant that the game had failed.

It was a warning about overheating, and it was going off a lot more often than it should have. Valve says that the overheating alert was supposed to go off at 100°C. Instead, the Steam Machine BIOS had the threshold set incorrectly, which is why the warning showed up at 90°C and 95°C, much lower than expected.

This is why so many owners saw the warning when it shouldn't have been shown. Valve is changing those threshold numbers, which should make the frequency of the warnings match what the console was meant to show in the first place. Fixing the threshold numbers addresses the warning itself, but it doesn't change the fact that the Steam Machine still runs hot under load.

The cooling solution inside the console appears to struggle against the APU it's paired with, meaning temperatures climbing toward the warning range isn't unusual behavior even after the fix goes into effect. Anyone picking up a Steam Machine should expect a console that runs warm rather than one that stays consistently cool, even with the corrected BIOS in place.