Ok well I had a bit of a problem on my home PC so I haven't posted my latest test render yet. My CPU cooler wasn't doing its job properly and my one core started heating up a bit too much. I got myself a nice aftermarket heatsink and spent last night installing and testing it and i'm running about 12 degrees cooler now under full load.

In my latest render the grainy effect is almost completely gone due to me pushing the samples on the gather nodes up to 1000 each. Unfortunately it has also pushed the render time from a few minutes to around 1.5 hrs but the result is worth it. There are 6 gather nodes in total so the render engine has a lot to calculate.

I have set the MaxDist on the gather nodes to 1000 now but i'm still not getting enough distance between the glowing object and the gather node before the gather node no longer 'sees' it. I'm still playing around a bit with that.

UA