Well, my laptop is a Acer Aspire 17,3" V3-771

Intel i7 quadcore 2.30 GHz (Turbo 3.3 GHz)

Nvidia GT 640M  2 Gb

12 Gb RAM

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I can play on medium to high settings before I can feel slightly FPS drops, but Max Payne 3 runs fine on high.

Thats because Arma II that DayZ is based on is a game with a huge map with a long draw distance and that hurts your memory. Graphics wise you can turn it down a lot and it won't look totally horrible. Question is if your RAM can handle it, the rest of your specs should handle it. 

My tip is to download the free Demo of Arma II and Arma II Operationg Arrowhead, and play around with the settings. If you can run the demo you surely can play DayZ.

Hope this was any help.