PSU ringing

When I woke up this morning.
I heard a high pitched ring or whine coming from corsair hx1000i psu.
I didn’t power up because I didn’t want to damage anything.
I have settings on rig to have power on usb ports when powered off, to charge gaming wireless mouse.
I unplugged psu and blew out psu with air compressor using low air pressure.
Plugged it back in and ringing was gone.
Powered up also and no ring.
Is something damaged or ready to fail in psu causing the ringing or dust caused the ring.
Should I rma the unit thinking the psu might damage my rig?

Capacitor failures often hiss, or outright explode ( see electroboom videos)
Some power supplies may contain alarms, but a whining noise is often a cooling fan.
But you cant rule out air turbulance noise.
( one old dell desktop i had used a flow deflector over the cpu that had not been trimmed of waste from the mould)
Air whistled over it and about drove me crazy.
(( :rofl:didn’t have to drive very far))!

The sound I thought was tinnitus.
But then put my ear by psu and heard it.
Do you think it was a coil in psu that was just dusty causing sound?

That sounds like coil whine to me. It could be that your PSU is squealing at some specific (low) load. Maybe when your gaming mouse is fully charged is switches to some low/intermittent power draw mode that made your PSU squeal?

(I have a 12 V 100 W PSU for my router that starts squealing when the router is turned off and the load at the wall drops to about 3 W.)

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It can be a number of things. At low load the regulators might start running in “pulse skip” mode which can take the actual switching frequency down into the audible range. I have some home designed PCB where the power supply whines horribly until a LED or something increases the load because of this.

It might have stopped because the load changed slightly, or that the inductors physical characteristics changed when you cleaned it. My bet would be on the load changing. It can be very narrow bands where inductors or capacitors produce loud noice. My old computer whined at some power settings for my keyboard LEDs

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Do you think I should RMA it ?
I am afraid in the future it might damage the rig.
It never made that sound before.

When you unplugged it you hung up on the caller that was ringing. That is why its not ringing anymore…

Sorry but had to put some humor into this lol

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It’s difficult to advise since I didn’t hear the sound myself, but if it sounded like I imagine it did (a “squealing” kinda sound), I wouldn’t return it. As Kebba said, it’s normal for switching power supplies to make weird sounds at some very specific low load levels.