14″ Mainstream T, A, & L Series – eBay Price Guide

Its that time of the year, price recommendations on ThinkPads! If you’re new to here or looking for the bread & butter of ThinkPads, the T400 series is for you! New models are added as Ice Lake and Ryzen Pro 3000 series made their debut in the summer of this year, after the last guide.

All prices are based in USD and United States.

Model – Laptop model, usually seen on the bottom right bezel of the LCD or to the top right of the keyboard. They contain a URL link to ebay sold listings.

Model i7 – On some of these there are a lot of computers. so I have a specialized search on eBay that has an i7, and comes with at least 500GB HDD, 8 or 16GB or RAM, or an SSD. If you’re thinking of fixing up a laptop to flip, this may be the price you’d sell it for.

Low – Lowest price I could find of a unit that turns on and has a hard drive. If it’s untested, you shouldn’t pay any more than this, as there are cheaper ones. If you’re looking to buy in bulk and flip, expect this price per unit if its 10 or more in a lot, but I doubt it’ll come with hard drives and power cords. Expect these to have at least moderate wear if they aren’t tested.

Mid – Laptop should work 100% at this price. If you’re in EU or Austraila, this might be the “low” price of a computer from other there.

High – Laptop should be in excellent condition, battery should be good to new. Refurbishers sell at this price for their grade A or B models. Additionally if you’re buying from like Iron Mountain, Arrow or bEsT bUy, this is probably their recertified price.

EX+ – These are top spec’d, New/New Old Stock, customized & excellent condition models. This is also about the price from Lenovo that are not Top Seller machines. Most likely sold by specialty individual sellers or Refurbishers. Sometimes the units are sold so high because they come with extra components or software.

CPU – The type of processor it has. I was thinking of putting what year it comes out, but they always have different production dates.

#sold – how many items sold within the past 3 months. The higher the number, the more are out there in the market. If the number is lower its because they don’t sell well due to supply, still too new, or people don’t buy em thru eBay.

Classic ThinkPads | 2003 – 2012

• Best Value – T420
• Next best – T430, its newer CPU gives it better battery life
• dGPU? – Don’t bother for this on these machines, the iGPU of the T420 and especially T430 runs circles
• Sought after – IPS T4x, T6x. T430 with 2GB dRAM GPU (overclock it!)
• Libre/CoreBoot on the T400 and T420 cost a pretty penny, because they are somewhat a pain in the ass to update the bios.

This group of ThinkPads arguably are the last of the great ones and are most serviceable. I say this because of replaceable CPU/RAM/LCD/DVD, as from the T440 and onward it would have soldered CPUs similar to the ultralight T400s series and removed the DVD bay, also it was the last of the simple design, with one battery that latches on to the rear. These also have the original hinges that always stay above the keyboard bezel, T440 and later have “drop hinges”, thereby compromising durability for a sleeker design. Opening these machines up has a few more steps but have robust designs in comparisons to the latter.

Size Discrepancies – T41, T42, T43, T60 & T61 can include prices for the bigger 15″ machines due to search limitations. If you buy a 15″ 4:3 display ratio laptop of the T41, T42,T43 or T60, you have a chance of getting the old IPS Flexview panel.

IPS Mod – $70 to $200 upgrade cost – T420 and T430 can get a mod chip that allows 40 pin eDP displays to be used. The 720p & 900p displays have terrible contrast ratios, and the chip unlocks most 1080p displays to be utilized. The chip costs from $45 to $70 and was originally produced by Ja-Javie & RMS Majestic. Additionally you’d need to buy a FHD IPS panel, which can cost $35 to $110 depending on parts availability & demand. Buyer Beware; DON’T BUY COMPATIBLE or REPLACEMENT PANELS, these can be cheaper panels, that are non 1080p or IPS! Only get if its guaranteed to be that exact model. Source B140HAN01.3 panels from Dell E7440, E7450 or similar laptops.

T61 – The most modded ThinkPad – This laptop is legendary, has 3 different frame variants and is a great donor board for IPS T60 FrankenPads. This Wiki post has plenty of information about the T61, though it hasn’t been updated since 2015. It suffers from the bad nVidia BGA solder of the past, given its been 10 years if it still works, it’ll work for awhile. The ThinkPad forums has plenty of help support for the machine, and it should cover almost all questions you want to throw at them.

Nu-ThinkPads | 2013 – 2017

• Best Value – T450
• Next Best – T440p because CPU upgrade
• lol wut – T25 went up in value!
• Speed – T460, T470 & T25 can use NVMe PCIe 3.0 x2 SSDs
• T470 may require the rectangle power plug or USB-C
• 1080p FHD IPS swaps available on all of these except maybe the T440
• NO QHD HERE!
• T460 & later require a 7mm drive if you decide to use one.
• A475 is basically the T470 with an AMD Processor
• T470 & T25 use DDR4 RAM, consider the T460 for cheap ram upgrades

Lenovo changed ThinkPads from here, almost all machines from here (Haswell) to present are all considered Ultrabooks. The keyboards used here has changed to the six row ‘Island Keys’ layout found from the X1 Carbon. Notoriously they had a new TrackPad design nicknamed ClickPad that was terrible, and they got a sort of gun metal dark grey color to them. Lenovo brought the ‘p’ moniker back for the T440p, but it was purely for marketing reasons. It and the T540p/W540/1 were the last to have a removable CPU, meaning last to get an upgrade without removing the whole motherboard.

With all that negative stuff aside, these are probably the best machines to get if you’re looking for a college word machine. A dGPU is optional on these machines, so you can do light gaming on them, or you can eGPU it. The later machines require a higher investment, these have the best price drops thanks to Ice Lake laptops. I would put more information here but sadly I don’t come across many of them so I can’t really comment about them.

The T25 has the best keyboard here, I’ve heard that its better than the X300! There was a fellow who modded a T480 motherboard to fit into a T25. The T25 gets a quadcore CPU but didn’t get an upgraded GPU, to which the next in the series greatly benefitted from.

Hot & Bothered ThinkPads – 2018 to 2019

• Best Value – T480 Kaby Lake R ver
• Next Best & Speed – T495
• No Ice Lake? – Not on eBay at least, get it thru Lenovo’s website.
• All use USB-C Power Jacks
• 768p in 2019? Yeah they come with it in base spec
• NVMe PCIe 3.0 x2 or x4 on these machines!
• RAM installed on these machines are 2666MHz but run on 2400MHz because of CPU limitations

The T480 is actually better than the T490 because it has two RAM slots! Lenovo decided to soldier RAM on the motherboard (8GB or 16GB) and give you one DDR4 RAM slot, so you might max out at 24GB instead of 32GB. Is that really needed? No, but still it is quite lovely to have.

Ayy MD Geist – The A485 & T495 don’t have dGPU options or QHD available (dunno if it can be modded, yet). Sadly the bios does not let you use ECC RAM on the machines, though the CPUs are capable of doing that. Still if you’re looking for a budget machine, they are quite nice.

T490 Ice lake? None are sold on eBay at least… though many people are selling them, no one bought one at the time of research. There’s also a variant called the Healthcare Edition (HE), which has an anti-microbal coating on the chassis (exterior??), a special fingerprint reader and some disk wipe software, supposedly works without restart. It is a slightly higher spec’d base machine than the entry models, but who knows if this will be spun out to be it’s own line.

Old L Series | 2008 – 2015

• Best Value – L430
• Best – L450
• Avoid – SL400

I can’t really comment on the L Series, never used them. Their build quality is different than the T series and is based upon the Edge or E Series ThinkPads, they don’t have subframes and they are sort of like the successor to the Z & R Series. Careful these may come with a Celeron or i3 processor, although some T Series supposedly can come configured that way too… Anyways, there are less mods available to these machines, luckily FHD IPS displays are available from the T450 and onward.

Newer L Series | 2016 – Present

• Best Value – L460
• Next Best – L480
• AMD discrete graphics instead of nVidia

I don’t know the build quality on them, but having used an E550… they are OK. Keyboard feel is down the shithole tho 🙁 L480 and later have NVMe PCIe 3.0 x2, otherwise m.2 SATA drives on these.

Old Economy Z & R Series 14″ 2005 – 2008

• Best Value – R400
• Next Best – …. Z61t Titanium Lid

Had to add the R and Z series here, might as well. In 2019 the most useable machines would be the R400 and R61. The Z Series hasn’t gone full classic price yet, but I wouldn’t doubt it will soon.