The prescribed performance-based prescribed-time tracking error consensus is investigated for second-order leader-following multi-agent systems in this work. Firstly, a suitable performance function is designed, which combined the prescribed performance and the prescribed-time consensus, to keep the error function always within the artificially predetermined performance envelope. Secondly, to provide each follower with the information of the leader, a novel distributed observer is created. In addition, by using the backstepping method, a novel tracking control strategy is proposed to achieve leader-following consensus before an arbitrary artificially predesigned prescribed-time. Finally, examples from simulations are used to illustrate the theoretical viability.