How can you determine if hardware is defective,or unsupported

I jsut purchased a board that after fiddling with it for a few days I cannot get it to adknowleged the onboard NIC card (See post in this section). Now I just tried adding another NIC to one of the PCI slots and boom! It works as nice as you please.

However it's not Windows (I'm trying to run BSD on it), so I'm sure this will be used by the sales droid when I call to return it, which driving an hour out of my way to do this, would be quite annoying.

The question that I want to know is that is there a way to determine if the componet is indeed defective, or is jsut not supported by the OS (the nForce4 drivers if I recall are a bit touchy on BSD, and the chipset for this board is nForce4). Iv'e tried adding the if_nfe drivers that have been suggested by a few to fix this issue,m but to no avail.

Anyways thanks to all that can offer some thoughts on this.

1.Throw you primary NIC to another machine if detachable.

2. If it works then what about NetBSD?
Here is why I mention it:
www.netbsd.org/Misc/about.html
www.netbsd.org/Misc/features.html#multi-platform

3. If not detachable then why not trying installing windows to make sure BSD is guilty?