Why You Can Trust CNET Working (or gaming) from home? Save on gear from Lenovo
From gaming laptops to docking stations, Lenovo's spring sale can save you some money this week.
Lenovo 's spring sale continues this week, offering steep discounts on laptops and PCs and gear you need to work from home. It's not, however, all work and no play -- Lenovo's gaming laptops are also included in the sale. Lenovo offers instant savings on many of the laptops and PCs on its site, and you can save more with with the coupon codes listed below.
This is the fifth week of Lenovo's spring sale. I've updated this article with the products that are in stock and the codes that are valid this week. Keep reading for the best deals I found on Lenovo's site.
Read more: This is the gear you need to work from home
Lenovo's ThinkPad T series is second only to the company's flagship X1 Carbon line in the ThinkPad pecking order. The venerable T series comes in 14- and 15-inch sizes and offers Intel and AMD processors. The ThinkPad T495 (model 20NJ0002US) features a 14-inch display and the AMD Ryzen 5 3500U CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 512GB solid-state drive along with the fantastic ThinkPad keyboard and a boatload of security features. The code THINKSPRING is applied automatically to get you massive savings on this stellar business laptop.
The Yoga C740 is Lenovo's midrange two-in-one laptop that can ping-pong between laptop and tablet modes with a display that rotates 360 degrees. It's available with a 14- or 15-inch display. If you're stuck at home, why not sacrifice a bit of portability for more room to work and get the bigger size? The second-from-the-top model (81TD0007US) features a 15-inch model with a 10th-gen Intel Core i7-10510U CPU, 8GB of memory and a 512GB SSD. With code EXTRAFIVE, you can save an additional $49 off the price, which was already discounted by $50.
If you've set up a home office during this time of self-quarantine, this compact docking station makes it easy to add your laptop to your home-office setup. The dock lets you run multiple displays from your laptop via its USB-C port, whether it's a ThinkPad or not. With two DisplayPort ports and one HDMI port, the dock can run up to three displays. It also supplies three USB 3.1 ports (three Type-A and one Type-C) and a pair of USB 2.0 ports so you can keep a keyboard and mouse attached along with a phone charger and other devices. With an Ethernet port, you can skip your home's iffy Wi-Fi for a more reliable and faster wired connection. The dock also runs power to your laptop, letting you plug and unplug a single cable for adding and removing your laptop to and from your home office. This dock is already marked down from $220 to $188, and you can save an additional $9 with code EXTRAFIVE.
You can knock 15% off Lenovo's budget gaming laptop, the IdeaPad L340, with code GAMING15. You won't find GeForce RTX graphics or a display with a fast 144Hz refresh rate, but you will get a well-rounded mobile gaming rig for less than $1,000 with the discount. The model that caught my eye features a 17.3-inch display powered by ninth-gen Intel Core i7-9750HF CPU, 8GB of RAM and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 graphics. For storage, it supplies a 256GB SSD for speedy data access and a 1TB hard drive.
Lenovo's line of Legion gaming laptops is marked down by 15%, and you can knock off another 5% with code EXTRAFIVE. My advice is to skip the GTX models in favor of one with Nvidia's current RTX graphics, specifically the GeForce RTX 2060 GPU. The RTX 2060 is the budget card in Nvidia's current RTX lineup and is an excellent value -- it can do ray tracing, which reproduces how light behaves in the real world to give games a more photorealistic look. This model features the ninth-gen Intel Core i7-9750H CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and GeForce RTX 2060 graphics. There are 15- and 17-inch versions of the Legion Y740. The 17-inch model with RTX 2060 graphics is currently sold out, but this 15-inch model is still in stock. The 15.6-inch display features a 1,920x1,080 resolution, Nvidia G-Sync, a speedy 144Hz refresh rate and 500 nits of brightness.