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With the c246 you'll be limited to Xeon E series chips. I'd stick with the z390 unless you have a need for ECC. It shouldn't be hard to find a z390 board with 8 SATA ports
they also support celeron procs that have onboard vid.
C246 doesn't support any of the consumer parts - to really take advantage of the Intel ecosystem you will want a 9700K or a 9900K as they ship at very aggressive clock speeds and can go even higher overclocked.
If you are planning on running stock and are content with 4GHz the Ryzen 2700X becomes a strong contender - its street price is substantially less than even the 9700K's, it has hyperthreads, and it comes with a really good stock cooler.
What 'consumer parts' are not supported by the c246 ? Can you just mention a couple ?
The problem I have with ryzen is the chipset. I want lots of sata ports.
HEDT platforms
The AMD X399 chipset drives them. It doesn't use a 3rd-party controller to add ports. The chipset supports up to 12 ports directly, but the ASRock only put 8 onboard. I guess they figured with 3x M.2 ports that it was enough. I suspect most of the X399 boards have a similar number of them.
Since I am living in the AMD HEDT world I am not sure how many pcie lanes and sata ports are provided in Intel's solutions. But I suspect that there are a similar number of pcie lanes and sata ports available.
Just to give you a heads up the c246 is not a desktop chip. You need a xeon cpu, and possibly ecc memory to to use it. It sits in the server/workstation gray area between desktop and HEDT systems. You might find it ends up being more costly in the end than a lower end threadripper system like a 1900x (which would give you all the expansion room I mentioned - only with an 8-core/16-thread CPU).The motherboard is more expensive (They usually pack a lot of stuff on them), but the bottom end chip is cheaper than price of a decent xeon and you can use plain-ol' ddr4 memory without getting into more expensive ecc stuff.
But you are right that desktop chipsets, both AMD's and Intel's, pretty much top out at 6 without adding onboard controllers for a couple more. I am assuming you are looking to one or more raid arrays requiring all the sata ports rather than doing a big file server or something. You can probably get away with the Z390 for that by adding in a SATA raid card (you don't have to configure them as raid if you don't want to - they just support it) from guys like Promise and Highpoint. Newegg & Amazon has tons of them. Also there may be motherboards with an on-controller onboard to give you a couple more sata ports. Just remember with the mainstream desktops you will have to choose between one or more features if you use them. There is simply a lack of pcie lanes available to go around.
Hope this helps.