Finally solved it, or at least came up with a workaround
So here is what i did to get it to work.
the culprit is this case is the new native ne1000 driver
gave it a shot and removed the ne1000 driver from the ISO and remapped the card to the older e1000e driver that had support for this card since ESXi 5.5U3 but that failed.
i also tried to leave the ne1000 driver and only remapped the PCI ID to the e1000e driver with no success, same as before "No supported adapters found" during installation.
I knew that this card worked in 6.0 so i installed 6.0 and it worked as expected, then i upgraded the installation with the latest 6.5a offline bundle (ESXi650-201701001.zip )
and the upgrade went fine but as expected the ne1000 driver failed to recognize the card, but at least i had a working install now and was able to access the DCUI.
Then i disabled the ne1000 driver using the command "esxcli system module set --enabled=false --module=ne1000" and rebooted, and voila, the older e1000e kicked in and initialized the card without problems .
Still beats me why removing the ne1000 driver directly from the installation media never worked.
Hope this helps
