I still haven't made any headway with this. I am in the exact same situation, and haven't been able to get esxi 5.5 u2 to install because it halts at the black screen.
My situation is:
1. Intel PE nic (supported) - have tried others
2. Nvideo GPU (both supported and unsupported variety tried...
I have an aging computer that I wished to turn into an ESXi server. It made a great workstation, and for many years remained my main computer, only recently giving way to a couple of laptops based on i7 cpus.
The motherboard is a D5400XS, equipped similar to how it ran the past 4 or 5 years...