Steam Machines with the ‘Red Line of Death’ get a simple, official cure: Clear the CMOS — clearing the CMOS can revive flat(red)-lining cubes
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Steam Machines with the ‘Red Line of Death’ get a simple, official cure: Clear the CMOS — clearing the CMOS can revive flat(red)-lining cubes Valve’s official social media team has shared a step-by-step process for reanimating RLOD Steam Machines. Late last week, we reported on a brand-new Steam Machine getting bricked during an update, and refusing to budge from a state freshly dubbed the ‘Red Line of Death’ (RLOD). The issue stirred fear in tech enthusiasts' hearts, still scarred by the notorious Red Ring of Death (RROD) from the Xbox 360 era. But we have some good news today, as Valve’s official account on Reddit has responded to provide step-by-step instructions to get any affected Steam Machine up and running again by clearing the CMOS. Thankfully, the pronouncement of death was definitely premature in this unresponsive Steam Machine case, and easily fixed. It wasn’t dead, it was resting, or probably pining for the fjords. It just needed to have its CMOS setting thoroughly cleared, that's all. SteamHWFeedback directly answered the distress call of OP me_hill on Reddit. A five-step recipe to recover Steam Machines with RLOD was provided to the beleaguered gamer. However, me_hill’s own flailing machine-reset procedure had already done the trick – inspired by numerous user comments on the thread. It is good to have an official solution to the initially scary RLOD, though. For the sake of exactitude, we have pasted Valve’s official RLOD fixing steps below, verbatim. If you're encountering this issue, please try the following: - Unplug the Machine, then press the power button a few times. This ensures any stored energy in the PSU gets discharged. You may see the power indicator LED blip a moment. - Plug the Machine back in. Note if your power LED glows (breathing pattern) white or not. If yes, please submit a Steam Support ticket and tag me, or send me a chat request with the ID. - Hold the power button down for ~6s. You should see the power indicator LED (dot) flash momentarily. Release the power button when you do. - The power indicator LED will start to cycle some color codes. These are designed to allow you to select various options for recovery/troubleshooting purposes. When the LED turns green, short-press the power button. This should perform a full "CMOS reset." - On the next boot, you should see the RGB bar as blue - it may take a bit longer to boot due to a memory re-training. There’d only been two public pleas by Steam Machine users about RLOD so far, as far as we can see. Perhaps several more users resolved these issues themselves, without any social media interaction, so it is difficult to know the scale of similar experiences. Nevertheless, we are relieved to learn that these symptoms are easily fixed and users can get back up and running on their coveted new gaming hardware pretty quickly – with the benefit of an officially sanctioned cure direct from Valve. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds. Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason. - Delbiie Great idea in theory, but this will also clear EXPO (AMD XMP equivalent) forcing the RAM to run at JDEC speeds. You'd need to manually go into the bios and enable EXPO again. Unless they hard-coded the RAM speeds and timings, but I do have my doubts.Reply I'm open to be corrected on this. Unless you know roughly what you're doing, I cannot recommend a CMOS reset. - hwertz That color code thing to access different recovery modes using just the power button is VERY clever.Reply I mean they did say in the article that the post clear reboot 'may' take longer due to memory retraining. I don't have first hand experience with any enthusiast setups but i think retraining is niot a thing at jedec speeds. I. e. it wipes the EXPO/XMP timings (as a CMOS clear should) but presumably factory default in the Steam Machine BIOS is EXPO/XMP enabled.Delbiie said:Great idea in theory, but this will also clear EXPO (AMD XMP equivalent) forcing the RAM to run at JDEC speeds. You'd need to manually go into the bios and enable EXPO again. Unless they hard-coded the RAM speeds and timings, but I do have my doubts. This does make it a bit unusual compared to a standard console since you'll get some system to system variation depending on exactly how high the RAM in your particular unit clocks. But it's nice (as long as the training ensures stabulity) to get the best possible speeds rather than making them all uniform. - CelicaGT Reply Neither the Deck, nor the Machine run overclocked RAM by default. Clearing the CMOS simply resets everything to how Valve had it. It's a perfectly fine step to take when troubleshooting either.Delbiie said:Great idea in theory, but this will also clear EXPO (AMD XMP equivalent) forcing the RAM to run at JDEC speeds. You'd need to manually go into the bios and enable EXPO again. Unless they hard-coded the RAM speeds and timings, but I do have my doubts. I'm open to be corrected on this. Unless you know roughly what you're doing, I cannot recommend a CMOS reset. Note that you can change CPU/GPU and SoC voltage offsets but in my experience the effects are marginal. - teeejay94 Reply Think more console less computer. Ram probably runs standard 4800MT for DDR5 or whatever equivalentDelbiie said:Great idea in theory, but this will also clear EXPO (AMD XMP equivalent) forcing the RAM to run at JDEC speeds. You'd need to manually go into the bios and enable EXPO again. Unless they hard-coded the RAM speeds and timings, but I do have my doubts. I'm open to be corrected on this. Unless you know roughly what you're doing, I cannot recommend a CMOS reset.
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