About the e1000e problem you were seeing with the built-in networking on the asrock:
I have an Asrock H97M Pro4 mobo, and I determined that the PCI ID returned by the card is not 1559, it's 15A1. Turns out some distributions have a new enough driver, some don't. In fact, there is a linux driver and a FreeBSD driver on Intels website, and the FreeBSD driver doesn't have the other IDs. I was able to patch the source and get FreeBSD to work. If you use the command lspci the last 4 digits on the end of the line is the ID. If you still have that board I'm curious what its ID was.