From what I've seen higher clocks only work when an app is poorly multi threaded or when the clock difference is significant *cough*xeon*cough*, but fair enough
Rumor has it that threadripper is 44 native for all of them. It's been confirmed that EPYC has 128 lanes. Do you think that will be enough for you?
off topic, I'm curious what did you put in those builds?
GTX 1080, running in an 8x slot, and a 4-way M.2 adapter card, fitted with 4x Samsung 960 Pro's (in the 16x slot) to allow capture from four capture cards which needed a minimum of 4 lanes each, with 8 high resolution camera capturing data in real time, each camera generating 900 MB/s of data, hence the need for the 4 way M.2 adapter.

Oh and the 10G network card's built in to the board to allow data transfer to the backup, and for processing and rendering off local capture unit.