Methods and devices for LTE cell search with large frequency offset are disclosed. In one embodiment of the invention, a UE divides the received signals into multiple frequency bins and transforms the signals into frequency domain through FFT. The UE performs correlating measures between the received signals and reference signals. The UE then performs an adaptive multi-try based peak selection such that the number of candidate is reduced. In one embodiment of the invention, the multi-try number is adaptively adjusted based on the channel condition. In one embodiment of the invention, the threshold of the peak selection is adaptively adjusted. In other embodiments of the invention, the UE performs non-coherent accumulation and selects a predefined number of coarse bin candidates. The number of non-coherent accumulation is adaptively adjusted. In another embodiment of the invention, the UE performs fractional frequency offset estimation and selects a fine bin candidate.