Quote:The GTX 340 is perhaps one of the strangest and rarest graphics cards you can find online today. As covered by the Budget-Builds Official YouTube Channel, the GTX 340 is, in fact, an unofficial GeForce 300 series card that Nvidia never actually produced. Instead, enterprising modders created the cards from standard GT units by adding souped-up dual-slot coolers, modifying the BIOS, applying a hefty overclock, and then changing the identifier string to make the card appear as a "GTX" model in the system.
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So what about the GTX 340? Apparently, someone years and years ago got into the business of upgrading GT 340s, which were then re-sold to system builders. The mods included a dual-slot cooler, a modified BIOS with the GTX nomenclature, and a hefty core overclock. In fact, the card shows up as a GTX 340 in GPU-z.

This strategy does make sense — the GT 340 is already very power efficient, consuming just 51W, so getting a good overclock out of the GT 340 wasn't hard at all with a cooler that's twice the size of the original.

Unfortunately, we don't know why this person (or people) decided to give the GT 340 the GTX 340 badge. Still, it was probably to help differentiate these heavily modified cards from the traditional GT 340.
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Of course, with how old this card is, performance is very underwhelming; the card can barely manage 30FPS in CSGO at 480P (yeah, it's that bad), and the performance delta between the GT 340 and the "GTX 340" is barely 2%, at most.

That's the story of the GTX 340; it's perhaps one of the most boring GPUs ever to be released, but it's cool that someone made a brand new SKU out of "thin air," and it seemed to have worked for them. At least from a business perspective. But good luck trying to buy one — they are super scarce on eBay and can only be bought overseas.