That being said, can anyone help me ballpark the max number of 4mp cameras I can run on a i7-8700K Coffee Lake 6-Core 3.7 GHz processor? Probably do Direct to Disk 24/7 recording. Probably will enabled motion detection for alerting during certain profiles (away, night, etc..)
You can calculate your total megapixels per second and compare against some of the results here:
Blue Iris Update Helper
Type "8700K" into the search box in the CPU Model column to filter to only 8700K results. Click on any row to bring up full details about what cameras and settings were used. Some of the systems are using far-from-optimal settings.
16 (cameras) * 4 (megapixels) * 30 (FPS) = 1920 MP/s which is more than you'll be able to run through one i7-8700K system. I believe the limit of Quick Sync video is in the area of 1500 MP/s, plus once you hit 50% CPU utilization on a processor with hyperthreading, usage rises much faster from there. Reduce the FPS to 15 and you're down to 960 MP/s which should be no problem.