What you're describing is is something that already exists in a more efficient form and is used all over the place in desert climates. Water cooled intakes = an evaporative cooler. If you use ice with it (like in the original post), you're just blending air conditioning with an evaporative cooler (and still takes a similar amount of power as AC).I'm currently cooling 33,000 watts of GPUs while using 602 watts or less to cool them (evaporative coolers in the spring/summer, fans in the fall/winter). It doesn't get much more efficient than that.
...in other words, what was used in the original post is just "reinventing the wheel". It's a cheap way to make a horribly inefficient evaporative cooler and would work "in a pinch", but it wouldn't work very well for removing a lot of heat effectively.
