This is more or less a "how to" for those interested in trying evaporative cooling, this design is based of one of my earlier designs that made use of copper tubing and required skills and tools to make that wern't available to everyone.
This is a revised design that can be assembled by pretty much anyone, requires no special tools, and all materials needed can be sourced easily and reasonably cheaply (and from the one place, Bunnings in my case)
This was my inital starting materials, a roll of 1/2'' micro-irrigation tubing, a collection of 1/2'' elbows and tees, couple of hundred small zip ties, large packet of "chux", and several dozen 60cm rigid micro-irrigation risers;
First step is to assemble the manifold that all the risers screw into, the exact design and layout of this is dependent on what container you're going to use, you basically make it large enough to take up as much of the floor area of the container as possible, see later pics for clarity. The 1/2'' micro-irrigation tubing is very stiff and wants to retain it's rolled up shape, tame it with some hot water to get it straight (don't let the kids handle that job)
Now for the "business end", get the chux out and cut each peice in half, when you buy the chux make sure you get a size that is suited to the length of riser you bought, systems with smaller pumps should use shorter risers to limit head loss. Now as per the picture roll up the chux on the riser and secure with some zip ties. repeat 40-50 times (or untill you run out of risers, or chux, or zipties)
Now to put our components together, you may want to buy one of those T shaped pokey things that they sell with the micro-irrigation stuff (used to poke holes in the 1/2'' semi-rigid tubing) anyway space the risers evenly and poke a hole and screw them in (don't get anal like I did and actually calculate and measure the hole spacing) rough enough is good enough for this application.
And you'll end up with something looking like that ^ . After intial testing I found that I didn't have enough risers to accomadate the water flow I had, I re-made the manifold and added more risers (47 in total), the end result is this;
I used a square container that can hold up to 45L of water, remember that water is heavy, you may have to brace your bench, like so;
I split the inlet up to get the flow a little more evenly distributed, but it's not essential to do.(ie, not a whole lot of difference, me=anal)
here you can see the wire work (single strand copper wire) to tame the risers, which otherwise can tend to flop all over the place with the weight of the water.
The "money shot", top temp is ambient, middle is water temp (NOT, repeat NOT cpu temp) , and relitive humidity at the bottom. This is cooling a 2100+@2.35, 1.85v, this is with 0 forced air, since it's winter I don't have the room fan going so the air is essentially dead still (and the evaporative cooling is just as dead silent)
an overall pic;
note the inline filter, a must have, especially with the current generation of micro-channel/jet blocks.