The initial cell search procedure of a terminal in an asynchronous wideband CDMA (WCDMA) system is discussed. The procedure consists of the following steps (not necessarily in this order): chip and frame synchronization; identification and synchronization of the long scrambling code; and determination of the target base station identity. Higuchi et al. proposed a cell search method for such a system. We propose a modification of that scheme which offers substantial terminal complexity reductions with the same performance. The price is a slight increase in delay. Furthermore, we study the impact on performance and complexity for different parameter settings for these methods.