Thank you!
i9-9900K is 5 years old though
Right now I have an i7-7700T and it can't handle real-time transcoding of even 1 stream (depending on input and output types).
i9-9900K is 2 years newer, so some chance it'd be OK, but not sure if it could handle more than 1 stream, and that's not much future proofing.
Decompression performance is also too slow for my needs on my current chip.
Since it's no longer produced it also costs the same as a CPU built this year.
It's sounding more and more like I should give up on xpenology and maybe go to OpenMediaVault, Rockstor, EasyNAS, Unraid or similar.
New UI to learn which would be a bummer, and I doubt any of them are quite as nice as DSM.