The conventional signature-matched RAKE processor for multipath direct-sequence code division multiple access channels is viewed as a regular linear tap-weight filter of length equal to the sum of the system processing gain and the user channel memory. In this paper, performance improvements are sought in the context of adaptive filtering under maximum signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio criteria. The minimum-variance-distortionless-response RAKE (RAKE-MVDR) filter and the lower complexity scalar optimized auxiliary-vector RAKE (RAKE-AUX) filter are developed. Bit error rate (BER) comparisons with the conventional RAKE signature-matched filter are carried out for training sets of reasonably small size, perfectly known, and mismatched/estimated channel coefficients, and extreme near-far system configurations.