I’m guessing that if your CPU is far below maximum capacity, at 40%, then upgrading the CPU won’t help. I mean, it seems like the bottleneck is elsewhere. The things I would look at are;
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Increasing the buffer size. I’ve seen it help export time.
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Try moving one test project and render export from / to local SSD drives. If you see a difference then despite pulling only 15MB/s off of the network something is clearly different there. And it also begs the question of just what your projects look like; the amount of tracks and the amount of processing etc. I know that Intel’s platform architecture often runs several peripherals through the chipset, which might include ethernet, and that chipset is limited to PCIe x4 even though there may be far more lanes available (on Threadripper for example a lot of connectivity goes straight into the CPU). It’s nearly 4GB/s though so I guess that shouldn’t be a problem. Anyway, I would try local versus network and see if there’s a difference.
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Go through your project’s plugins and see if there are particular ones that are ‘heavy’ one way or another. I know on my pathetically old system using multiple of iZotope’s RX Dialog Denoisers in realtime will bring the system on its knees, and on Pro Tools v12.x there at least was an issue with Equilibrium EQ which made it export slower than expected (during non-realtime exports). There’s also the off chance that a plugin “needs time” for one reason or another. I’m thinking of plugins like UA’s UAD plugins which I believe under certain circumstances slows down export speeds. I’m not sure if that’s because they’re already maxxing out their connection’s bandwidth or if they’re already at maximum computation speed, but that’s what I’ve heard. So if you suspect a plugin then maybe try to render a segment of the show with and without it.