Their 18 core smashes records? How so? The 14, 16, and 18 core parts dont even exist right now unless they're just rebranded xeon parts slapped on 2066 socket. Intel announcing those 14 core to 18 core parts was a complete knee jerk reaction to threadripper. They're trying their hardest not to get anywhere close to competing with their xeon parts for servers.
x299 is a complete clusterfuck. WTF were Intel thinking making 4 core i5s available for a HEDT chipset, and just how do they expect motherboard makers to optimize a board/chipset that has to do dual channel and quad channel, from 4 cores all the way up to 18 core chips, from 16 pcie lanes all the way to 44, etc. ? It's just a completely stupid move on their part. Intel forcing you to pay money to run a RAID setup or buy their optane SSDs to run RAID is beyond dumb also.