Hi Dean,
The last Mac Pro tower of 2012 was very good in that it could be upgraded with RAM, storage and PCi cards. I have a 12 core 2012 model and it still works fine for image processing. The 2010 Mac Pro is essentially same as the 2012 model. Both the 2010 and 2012 models can be upgraded to current MAC OS systems High Sierra, and even Mojave (replace the existing video card with a metal one).
The Mac Pro tower was replaced in 2013 with a cylindrical shape computer known as the "Trashcan", and can not be upgraded nearly as much as the tower models. The "trashcan" Mac Pro is not a bad device but was not a suitable replacement for the tower in the opinion of many Apple customers. The new Mac Pro tower, introduced this year, appears to be a great computer, but for now it is a bit expensive for my budget. Many feel that the late iMacs are better computers than the "Trashcan" Mac Pro, and they are certainly much less expensive.
To work with very large files of 2 GB and larger you need a lot of RAM, and "scratch disk" storage for Photoshop. You should not have a problem with 48-64 GB of RAM and lots of storage, in general RAM and storage is more important in processing image files than processing speed.
What is the MAC platform you will be using to scan the files? In general any MAC G4 or G5 with SCSI that runs OSX 10.3.6 or 10.4 is fairly easy to use with Silverfast since the operating system is quite similar to current systems. But old systems with only 1-2 GB of RAM will not allow you to do much image processing so you will need to transfer the files to a newer platform. For that you definitely need a fast port such as Thunderbolt or USB2. The USB1 ports on early G4 towers are very slow.
Sandy
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